Hey, it's Greg

At 12, this week's guest got a visit from the local phone company after his homemade war dialer turned up three of their mainframes. Four decades and five startup exits later, he's building something that lets AI agents drive real robots around his studio.

More on that below.

What's the first robot you'd hand over to an AI agent? Hit reply and I'll share the best answers in a future edition.

In this week's edition:

This week I sat down with Chris Matthieu, VP of Developer Ecosystem at RealSense.

Chris has been hacking for 40 years, with five startup exits along the way (including Octoblu to Citrix and Computes to Magic Leap), before joining Intel as an entrepreneur in residence. RealSense became the standout of that incubator, and when Intel spun it out as an independent company last year, Chris signed on to spend his days talking to developers about robots and AI.

His latest obsession: AgenticROS, an experimental project that connects agents like Claude, Codex, and Gemini directly to ROS. His three-foot robot Bob runs it. Ask Bob to follow him, and the agent works out where Chris is from the camera feed, how far away he is, and how to drive the wheels to keep up, with nobody scripting that behavior ahead of time.

Some of what we covered:

• Why skipping ROS usually means rebuilding an ecosystem that already exists
• The Intel lesson that changed how he builds: find the migraine customers will pay to fix, then build the solution
• How RealSense ended up in roughly 60% of robots and 80% of humanoids
• The $85 camera that makes a working ROS robot possible for under $500
• How one LinkedIn post about Bob hit 180,000 impressions and led to NVIDIA webinars and standing-room-only talks
• Whether the huge physical AI funding rounds are justified

If you're hiring engineers, building a robot, or trying to break into the space, his advice on side projects and building in public makes this one worth the listen.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

Sales Key Account Manager, Robotics & Automation | Greater Boston (hybrid)
Own strategic accounts for custom automation solutions, from discovery and RFQs through contract close. 5 to 10 years selling robotics, industrial automation, or capital equipment. Up to 50% travel.

Senior Robotics Software Engineer, Localization | Los Angeles
Venture-backed space company building autonomous lunar rovers. Own localization with no GPS, extreme lighting, and wheels slipping in loose regolith. Space experience is optional; off-road, defense, and drone backgrounds translate well. U.S. Persons only.

Machine Learning Engineer | New York
AI-forward consumer platform with millions of users. Backend engineer who trains and deploys models in production, building a RAG recommendation pipeline that's moving toward agentic, tool-calling behavior. Python, FastAPI, AWS.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

Long Horizon, Encord's first Physical AI Summit, runs October 20 and 21 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Day one is robotics and embodied AI. Day two covers autonomy across AV, ADAS, drones, and defense.

A few names from the speaker lineup:

• Sebastian Thrun, Founder of Google X and Waymo
• Deepak Pathak, CEO at Skild AI
• Alex Kendall, CEO at Wayve
• Carolina Parada, VP and Head of Robotics at Google DeepMind
• Quan Vuong, Co-founder at Physical Intelligence
• Ken Goldberg, Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-founder at Ambi Robotics

Executives from Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Nuro, Skydio, and Saronic will be there too. Tickets are limited, so grab yours early.

China Installs 59% of New Factory Robots as EU Installations Fall 11% (The Next Web)
The IFR's World Robotics 2026 numbers: a record 603,000 installs in 2025, 354,000 of them in China, with the U.S. overtaking Japan for second place.

General Robotics Is Betting on Modular Intelligence, Not One Robot Brain (The Robot Report)
CTO Sai Vemprala makes the case for composing specialized skills over one do-everything model, a useful counterpoint to Chris's view that agents can figure more out on their own.

Agility Robotics, Maker of Digit Humanoid, Exploring Wheeled Robots (The Robot Report)
After a wheeled rendering showed up at the end of the Digit 5 launch video, CEO Jonathan Hurst confirmed they're studying other form factors as Agility heads toward its SPAC.

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