He went looking for an affordable room in the Bay Area. He found a co-founder, a classmate, and a company. Now he is putting a physical therapist inside a five-pound robot.
CEO & CO-FOUNDER // ATDEV (ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT, INC.)
Todd Roberts runs a robotics company that fits in a backpack and a federal grant proposal at the same time.
Today, Roberts is CEO and co-founder of ATDev, a twelve-person robotics outfit that spun out of UC Berkeley and now works out of San Diego. The company's first product, Reflex, is a guided at-home rehabilitation robot for people recovering from knee surgery. It weighs less than a laptop. It walks a person through their exercises, watches how they move, and quietly sends that data to a clinician who can adjust the plan from miles away. No clinic waiting room. No guesswork between appointments.
That is the small version of the idea. The large version is an ecosystem - a family of robotic and telehealth devices designed around one stubborn principle: that staying independent should not depend on how much money you have or how close you live to a specialist. In October 2025, investors put $3 million behind that principle. A month later, ATDev took a seat in a $41 million federal initiative to reinvent robotic mobility.
Roberts is an engineer first. He talks about ability the way other founders talk about market size - as something to expand, not segment. The numbers behind the company are blunt: roughly 61 million Americans live with a disability, and about 10,000 people turn 65 every single day. The supply of modern, affordable, well-designed assistive tools has not kept pace with any of it. ATDev is Roberts's answer to that gap, and Reflex is the first sentence of it.
What is unusual is the order he chose to build in. Most hardware founders chase the flashiest demo. Roberts started with the least glamorous corner of recovery - the weeks after a knee operation when motivation fades, appointments are sparse, and most of the work happens alone at home. That is precisely where outcomes are won or lost, and precisely where almost no one had put a robot.
The founding story does not start in a lab. It starts with a budget. Roberts had finished his mechanical engineering degree at Northeastern and moved west for graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he was researching exoskeletons. Bay Area rent being what it is, he went looking for somewhere affordable to live.
He answered a housing ad. His new landlord was Owen Kent, a recent graduate and a lifelong tinkerer in assistive technology. The two soon discovered a second coincidence: they were sitting in the same biomechanics course. A shared roof, a shared classroom, and a shared conviction that the tools built for people with limited mobility were rarely built with those people in the room.
Roberts describes Kent as "somebody who has been in the assistive technology space his whole life as an innovator and as a tinkerer and thinker - really a visionary." Out of that pairing - the trained engineer and the lived-experience inventor - ATDev was born in 2020. The company's design ethos became almost a slogan: for users, by users.
It is a tidy story, but the substance underneath it is what carried. Roberts brought a real engineering pedigree to the partnership. Northeastern is a school built around co-op work experience, which means he graduated having already shipped engineering in the field rather than only on paper. At Berkeley he went deeper into biomechanics, the discipline that studies how human bodies actually move, load, and recover - the exact physics a rehabilitation robot has to respect if it is going to help instead of hurt. The exoskeleton research he did there was the early version of a question he is still answering: how do you build a machine that works with a human body rather than against it.
Kent brought the other half - not a job title, but a lifetime of using, modifying, and reimagining the tools the assistive-tech industry hands people. The earliest concept for what became Reflex came from his world: a device to help people keep their joints mobile and prevent the stiffening that comes from being unable to move them. The two founders pointed that same idea at a far larger audience, the millions of people recovering from routine orthopedic surgery, and a product took shape.
Todd Roberts - mechanical engineer, exoskeleton researcher, grant writer, CEO. The how.
Owen Kent - co-founder, assistive-tech innovator, the originator of the ideas the robots are built around. The why.
Met: a Bay Area housing ad, circa 2019.
Reflex is ATDev's flagship: a smart, telehealth-enabled robot built to guide people through knee rehabilitation at home. It runs personalized, adaptive exercise routines, tracks how a person is actually moving, and shares that data wirelessly so a clinician can fine-tune the program without an in-person visit. The whole thing weighs under five pounds.
It launched in the United States in 2025 as a limited release across ten states. The idea behind it is bigger than one joint - it is a proof that high-quality, guided recovery does not have to live inside a clinic.
The design choices read like a list of small rebellions against how rehab usually works. Adaptive difficulty, so the exercises meet a person where they are on any given day. A simple, friendly interface, because the people using it are not engineers. Remote adjustment, so a clinician stays in the loop without anyone driving across town. And a weight target low enough that the whole system never feels like medical equipment so much as a helpful object on the counter.
ATDev's RAMMP wheelchair technology is and will remain open source.
A single rehab device is a product. An ecosystem is a thesis. In 2025, Roberts and ATDev signed up for the harder version. The company joined the Robotic Assistive Mobility and Manipulation Platform, or RAMMP - a $41 million initiative funded by ARPA-H, the federal health research agency, and led by the University of Pittsburgh.
The partner list is the kind that usually signals a company has stopped being a startup people humor and started being one they call. RAMMP brings together Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Northeastern, and Purdue on the academic side, with robotics firms Kinova and LUCI Mobility on the commercial side. The aim is robotic mobility and manipulation for people who need help moving through the world and acting on it - the wheelchair and the arm, not just the knee.
And in a move that says a lot about how Roberts thinks, ATDev committed to keeping the RAMMP wheelchair technology open source. The company is wagering that the field moves faster, and more people get helped, when the core stays shared rather than locked behind a patent wall.
The $3M seed round was led by Dobrzelecki Legacy Ventures, with Uphonest Capital and Life Science Angels joining. Total funding to date: $3M, on a seed stage.
61M Americans living with a disability. 10,000 people turning 65 each day. One company arguing those are not edge cases - they are the market.
Roberts started in an exoskeleton lab and is the principal investigator on the federal grants funding Reflex. He measures progress in working hardware, not slide decks.
"For users, by users" is not marketing at ATDev - it is the reason the company exists. The product roadmap runs through lived experience.
Plenty of medtech companies guard their IP. ATDev committed to keeping its RAMMP wheelchair technology open source to speed up the whole field.
The entire company traces back to a Craigslist-style room rental. The landlord became the co-founder.
Reflex weighs less than five pounds yet streams rehab data to clinicians who can re-tune the program remotely.
He pivoted from research exoskeletons to consumer-friendly rehab robots - same physics, different living room.
A world where ability is never limited by cost or infrastructure - one robotic device, and one recovered knee, at a time.