Robot.com's CEO on automating the work that makes people quit
Robot.com CEO Felipe Chavez talks to Business Insider about the company's pivot from delivery robots to workplace humanoids — and why people stay essential in an automated future.
Robot.com CEO Felipe Chavez talks to Business Insider about the company's pivot from delivery robots to workplace humanoids — and why people stay essential in an automated future.
In an interview with Business Insider, Robot.com CEO and co-founder Felipe Chavez laid out the company's path from Kiwibot's campus delivery robots to workplace humanoids — a pivot he says has been nearly two years in the making.
The centerpiece is R-noid, a humanoid on a wheeled base rather than legs, designed to package orders, load and unload boxes, and prep workstations across food service, logistics, and healthcare. It pairs dual seven-degree-of-freedom arms and an articulated torso with custom foundation models developed with Physical Intelligence, one of the company's AI lab partners.
On the question that shadows every automation story — what happens to workers — Chavez argued that humans remain essential in a robotic future, pointing to the people who maintain and guide autonomous systems and train humanoids through teleoperation. According to the report, fewer than 40 R-noids have been deployed so far across roughly a dozen customers in industrial, food-service, and logistics settings.
This is a summary. Read the full interview at Business Insider.