@adnothing
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Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at @WaldenRobotics . Adjunct Prof of CS at @Stanford, ex partner at @CalibrateVC & head of ML at @ToyotaResearch
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2012
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Lots of really good, hard earned lessons about robotics in the real world and what's coming next!
What does it take to get robots out of the lab and onto the factory floor?
Our CEO @RussTedrake joined @BradPorter_ on Deployed to talk DARPA lessons, wheels vs. legs, factory safety, and why deployment is all about the details.
cobot-deployed.com/ep12
I ❤️ that chocolate 😋 The real world is an endless (non-stationary!) stream of such examples. Scaling requires continuous learning from deployments (from foundations to specialists). One of the lessons from self-driving that transfers to mobile manipulation.
A video from a Pi robot deployed at Dandelion Chocolate, fully autonomous w/ no interventions. 🤖
Deploying robots has taught us surprising lessons about the gap between proof-of-concept (i.e. building one box) and real-world utility (productively building boxes for hours).
I expected that the hard part is building the box, since it’s the most dexterous, but that wasn't what we found. Counterintuitively, the hardest part was reliably stacking the boxes. Our original table-mounted robot had poor visibility of the stack without special separately-mounted cameras. Plus, stacking requires more generalization (each box is placed in a different location), and an imprecisely-placed box can lead the entire stack to collapse many boxes later.
We recently switched this deployment over to a mobile robot, and it's fun to watch the robot being completely self sufficient for multiple hours. 🙂 Data and feedback from real world use-cases like these are quite valuable for the π pre-trained model as we scale!
Stacked event with many of my favorite people! Join us for some hard earned insights about how to rapidly deploy general-purpose robots that are broadly useful across industries and learn continuously in production!
Robotics and world models take center stage at @FellowsForum 2026 on September 24, cohosted by @Fellows_Fund and @nebiusai, in partnership with @nvidia.
For founders and researchers building Physical AI, how often do you get to hear from this many leading robotics and world-model teams in one place?
We’re bringing together leaders from @NVIDIA, @GeneralistAI, @RhodaAI, @odysseyml, @Waymo, @DynaRobotics, @CloudChef, @Tutor Intelligence, @SereactAI, and @WaldenRobotics, for a full day of intensive discussions on how AI learns, understands, and acts in the physical world.
Very proud of our efforts with Samsung and our strong partnership with SDS! We are hiring fast and accelerating on all fronts (hardware, software, AI, deployments, commercial...). Join us now, especially if your favorite movie is "Everything, everywhere, all at once" 😉
Our work with @SamsungSDSA is moving into specific manufacturing use cases. Working with various Samsung affiliates, Walden’s general-purpose robots were used to test tasks including parts transport and consumables replacement.
Working with Samsung has pushed aspects of our technology stack in truly new and exciting ways. We’re excited to continue accelerating the relationship.
biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026…
Come listen to "Adrien Walden" at Fully Connected! He's my alter ego deploying general-purpose robots that do useful work today alongside people. Great guy 😉 (PS: "Gaidon" indeed rhymes with "Walden" in typical English pronunciation, and my wife thinks I'm married to my job anyway 😂 This is my favorite typo of the year ❤️)
Adrien Walden led ML at Toyota Research. Then he co-founded @WaldenRobotics, which just left stealth with $300M.
Catch @adnothing bringing physical AI to #FullyConnected26. Sept 29–Oct 1, SF.
Register here: utm.io/usfdT
Adrien Gaidon retweeted
When we first started working on Diffusion Policy, which felt like an "unlock" for fitting human demonstration data, the explanation I gave myself was that "human demonstration data was subtly much more multimodal than we thought, so we need the modeling power of denoising diffusion to fit it properly."
What Michael's paper brings to light is that some of this multimodality was probably exacerbated (more than I realized) by the fact that we've only been giving our models incredibly short observation context lengths.
For me, this is pretty compelling evidence that we should be pushing for policies with long-context lengths and short action prediction horizons.
Action chunking — especially executing long action sequences open-loop — is widely used in imitation learning for robotic manipulation. Why is it so effective and do we really need it? We find a key reason:
Long open-loop execution helps short-context policies imitate non-Markovian experts.
With this insight, we show how to move beyond open-loop execution: extending policy context restores reactivity while achieving even higher task performance.
🧵(1/5)
We're growing fast across the full stack: join us at Walden to make general-purpose robots continuously improve from deployment at scale! A bunch of us are at Actuate today: come say hi and apply!
Building general-purpose robots takes frontier Physical AI and practical systems engineering. We’re bringing together people across AI, software, hardware and deployment to push the state of the art and make it work in production.
Join us: waldenrobotics.com/careers
We just moved into our new SF office and are growing fast. Join a cracked team building Physical AI to deliberately supercharge physical work!
The lights are on in San Francisco. Our new office is officially open in downtown SF, giving Walden a home on both coasts as we build the team behind our general-purpose robots. More from SF soon, We’re hiring in SF and Cambridge: waldenrobotics.com/careers
In the wild, autonomy is never an all-or-nothing proposition: it is a ratio. How do you train, eval, and deploy systems that continuously improve while always doing the work? Read on to get a sneak peek at our different approach to Physical AI!
Autonomy isn't binary. Neither is robot learning.
In our latest post, CTO & co-founder @Ben_Burchfiel explains why deployment, remote assistance, and high-quality training data are deeply connected.
waldenrobotics.com/news/auto…
Humility and empiricism are key to progress in Physical AI. Focusing on deployments (the true data distribution!) ensures usefulness and learning the right lessons as fast as possible. Those are often humbling and delightfully surprising: there is a long tail of unknowns unknowns!
What does it mean to be a robotics engineer in the age of foundation models? @RussTedrake, joined @bheater on Automated to explore how machine learning is becoming central to robotics, shifting engineers from programming behavior to designing experiments. bit.ly/4fGZh3S
ALT Podcast artwork showing Russ Tedrake beside the headline "How Robots Learn in 2026," with the Automated with Brian Heater logo in the corner.
At @WaldenRobotics, we're roboticists playing on team human. This conversation between @RussTedrake and Evan Ackerman (@BotJunkie ) in IEEE Spectrum captures that well: practical general-purpose robots can create "workplaces where skilled craftspeople are able to do even more with their hard-earned expertise, increasing their efficiency, productivity, and happiness all at the same time" spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-r…
Adrien Gaidon retweeted
A robot that works perfectly in a demo isn't the goal. A robot that shows up every day, works safely alongside people, and keeps production moving is.
Great discussion at @autonomousevent on what it takes to bring general-purpose robots into manufacturing. Thanks for having us!
ALT Russ Tedrake, CEO of Walden Robotics, speaks on stage at the Autonomous conference, holding a microphone and gesturing during his keynote. A large event screen is visible in the background.
Adrien Gaidon retweeted
The future of robotics won't be decided by demos. It'll be decided by what works in the real world. Great conversation with @tbpn on why we're betting on deployment from day one.
youtube.com/watch?v=w1aTrmUx…
ALT Screenshot from a TBPN interview featuring Walden Robotics CEO Russ Tedrake speaking remotely between hosts Jordi Hays and John Coogan. The on-screen headline reads, "Walden Robotics Exits Stealth at $1.1B."
Partners in the field are the most insightful teachers. Even though we just started our work with Samsung SDS, we have already learned so much from EVP Joseph Ahn, Ph.D. and his team. We are so grateful for Samsung's conviction in us and our strong partnership to deploy useful general-purpose robots!
Building great robots takes great partners.
Proud to be collaborating with @SamsungSDSA on a proof of concept focused on manufacturing use cases, combining Walden's robotics platform with Samsung SDS' manufacturing expertise.
More: bit.ly/4fZJwoJ
ALT Walden Robotics and Samsung representatives shake hands as colleagues applaud, with two Walden robots on either side.
Come say hi and hear about what've already learned being deployed in the field with a general-purpose robot that people love to work with! (And our stickers are indeed the best...)
Hot off our launch yesterday, our CEO @RussTedrake is giving a talk today Thursday July 16 in SF at the Autonomous conference at 4:30pm PT on "Deploying general-purpose robots (introducing Walden Robotics)". Come hang out with Russ and Adrien (@adnothing ) at the conference to chat about useful robots doing real work today (and get some of our cool stickers...)!
It's a pleasure and privilege to count Russ as a friend and co-founder at @WaldenRobotics Check out his blog below to learn more about our purpose. Our robots are already doing real work for and alongside people today, and we're just getting started. Let's build together!
In January, I started "building something new" with an incredible team. Today I finally get to share some first details about what we've been building. We've called it Walden Robotics (waldenrobotics.com).
I thought long and hard about my own reasons for starting this company. It's not only about the robots. It's also about people. I've tried to capture those thoughts in my first Walden blog post: waldenrobotics.com/news/why-…
It's been an incredible ride so far. Within just a few months of forming the company, we were already operating a general-purpose robot with an end-to-end policy in production in one of the most important factories in North America. It's amazing at how much I've already learned from that experience. There is a lot of work to do, but the mission has never been so clear.
Please help me welcome Walden Robotics into the world. And stay tuned for more updates!
youtube.com/watch?v=fewvZrck…
The hardest problems in AI aren't research problems anymore. They're deployment problems. It’s how we actually deliver real value, today, to build the future people want.
That’s why, after 20 years in AI, my next step was inevitable: make robots do useful work for and alongside people, right now.
Today, I am delighted to announce the launch of @WaldenRobotics to tackle just that.
We started this year and are coming out of stealth today with a $300M seed round backed by some of the most serious companies and investors in the world. They have seen firsthand our general-purpose robots being useful in production on day one, and getting better every day after. You can see a glimpse of what we've been building in the video below.
Physical AI has gone through a rapid phase transition, in part thanks to pioneering research from my friends and co-founders @RussTedrake , @Ben_Burchfiel , Siyuan Feng, @RaresAmbrus , and many others at Walden. But from our long experience working together with co-founders Kerri Fetzer-Borelli and Dave Johnson, we learned how hard it is to deploy cutting-edge AI in a real, live, incredibly sophisticated production environment with an intricate ballet of automation and human ingenuity.
That’s why we deliberately created Walden Robotics as a full-stack, human-centric, customer-focused robotics company from the start: we seeded the company with a world-class team across hardware, software, AI, deployment, operations, product, and business talent, so we could continuously optimize our whole system end-to-end, deeply and purposefully, from real-world experience with real customers.
The efficacy of this strategy speaks for itself: since February, our general-purpose robots have been doing useful work in production at a Toyota plant in North America, moving from first pilot to real work in under two months. Not a lab. Not a demo. Not a future promise. Real work on a real line, today, at one of the best large-scale manufacturers in the world, with general-purpose robots that get better every day. And this is just the beginning.
Two ways to find us:
If you run a manufacturing or logistics business and want robots that are widely useful now, not someday, let's talk. We own “hirearobot.com” for a reason!
And if you want to build them: we're hiring across the company, from software, to hardware, AI, ops, product, business, and more. In particular, as the Chief Strategy Officer at Walden, I am recruiting for three incredibly impactful founding roles to fuel our agent-native go-to-market engine. Check out waldenrobotics.com/careers
Let’s build together!