Eric Law: Lumber, Robotics, Innovation, Sustainability | Turn the Lens Ep31
Release Date: 04/29/2024
Werner Kraus: Clean Room Humanoids, Got Particles? Get Certified | Turn the Lens Ep54
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Werner Kraus leads robotics research at Fraunhofer IPA, where 1,000 engineers work on production systems and the unglamorous infrastructure that makes humanoids commercially viable: standards. Not the headline-grabbing demos, but the 30-40 tests required before a robot can enter a semiconductor clean room. The certification processes that determine if particle emissions from gear grease will contaminate pharmaceuticals. The biomechanical measurements proving that 500 Newtons of collision force is 3x too high for human safety. Standards enable commercialization. Without them, you can't get...
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Chris Kudla: A Humanoid to Hug,‘ Just Right’ Level of Human | Turn the Lens Ep53
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Chris Kudla, Co-Founder and CEO of Mind Children, explains why his company is building social humanoid robots instead of utility workers. While most humanoids focus on warehouse tasks and manufacturing, Mind Children is tackling the harder problem: creating robots for education, healthcare, hospitality, and elder care—applications where empathy and emotional connection matter most. In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Chris walks through the challenging engineering problem of avoiding the "Uncanny Valley"—that unsettling feeling when robots look almost, but not quite, human. He...
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Joe Michaels: Teleoperation, Controlling Complex Robots By Feel | Turn the Lens Ep52
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Joe Michaels, SVP of Sales and Marketing at 1HMX, explains why haptic feedback and teleoperation are critical for training humanoid robots. While synthetic data and video help robots learn basics, the fine-tuning that makes them truly functional comes from human operators using advanced haptic gloves with 135 points of tactile feedback. In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Joe walks through how HaptX's microfluidic technology creates realistic touch sensations, why video training alone can't handle dexterous manipulation, and how the newly announced Nexus NX1 full-body system...
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Evan Wineland: Deploying is the Point. Affordable Robots that Work | Turn the Lens Ep51
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Evan Wineland and his co-founder started Weave Robotics with a principle that cuts through the industry's typical timeline: "Deploying is the point. It is the strategy. It is the value." They incorporated in late 2024, had a proof of concept by mid-year, and were shipping paid deployments by late 2025. Just over a year from founding to working robots earning their keep in San Francisco laundromats. I caught Evan at Humanoids Summit 2025 at the Computer History Museum, then headed up to Sea Breeze Laundromat on Castro Street to see one of Weave's robots actually working. Not a demo. Not a...
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Jeremy Fishel: Nature's Best Manipulator, Man's Best Controller: Hands | Turn the Lens Ep50
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Jeremy Fishel, Principal Scientist at Sanctuary AI, explores why human hands remain robotics' greatest challenge and most important breakthrough opportunity. With nearly two decades of research in tactile sensing, dexterity, and manipulation, Jeremy brings unique insights into why replicating the human hand is exponentially harder than achieving robot vision or locomotion. He discusses a surprising control paradox: humans struggle to master simple machines like excavators (4 degrees of freedom) yet effortlessly control the complexity of our hands and arms (50+ degrees of freedom). The answer...
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Jeff Burnstein: Robotics Imperative, Standards, National Strategy | Turn the Lens Ep49
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), reveals why eight countries have national robotics strategies while America doesn't—and what four decades of industrial robot history teaches us about humanoid adoption. In this interview from Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Jeff explains the critical role of safety standards in commercialization, why Japan's 1960s strategy created sustained leadership while China dominates today, and how A3 is reframing "robotics" as "embodied AI" to gain traction in Washington D.C. Key Topics: • Why national robotics strategies drive...
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Ed Colgate: Soft Hands, Dexterous Robots | Turn the Lens Ep48
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Ed Colgate, Northwestern University, and Director of the HAND ERC reveals why the secret to dexterous manipulation isn't precision engineering, but something surprisingly simple: softness and large contact areas. In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Ed explains the fundamental difference between human and robot manipulation, how AI finally enables control of complex hands, and why artificial muscles might solve the chronic overheating problem. Key Topics: • Why large soft contact areas matter more than finger articulation • How softness enables sensing and control, not just...
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Nic Radford: Declining Labor, Generalizable Skills, Ready Market | Turn the Lens Ep47
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Nic Radford, Co-founder and CEO of Persona AI, sits down with Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 (presented by ALM Ventures) to unpack a hard truth: robots aren't difficult to build—they're difficult to make useful. Radford's career arc reads like a tour of extreme environments: NASA space robotics, deep ocean exploration, and now shipbuilding automation. Each demanded solving communication, distance, and harsh conditions. This time, he's focused squarely on commercial viability from the start. His framework for finding the right market is brilliant: look beyond the traditional "3Ds"...
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Pete Florence: Generalist, Scaling Laws, Train One Improve All | Turn the Lens Ep46
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
What if training a robot to do ONE thing automatically made it better at EVERYTHING? Pete Florence, Co-founder & CEO of Generalist and former Google DeepMind Senior Research Scientist, joins Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 to reveal a breakthrough that fundamentally changes how we think about robot intelligence. The big discovery? Robotics has finally found its scaling laws—just like large language models. At 7 billion parameters, models cross an "intelligence threshold" where more data predictably equals more intelligence. No more hitting walls. No more plateaus. Just continuous...
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Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens Ep45
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Five game-changing AI tips from my training with Kyle "KMo" Moschetto. Discover the RGCOA framework for prompt engineering, why paying for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is essential for serious work, and how understanding tokens, context windows, and temperature settings can dramatically improve your results. Practical, tested insights you can apply immediately to get more from generative AI tools. Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 45 Transcript and Show Notes
info_outlineEric Law went searching for robotics opportunities in the construction industry, where machines have been used for decades, starting with earth-moving steam shovels in the 19th century. Recently, drones have taken on some of the more difficult and dangerous tasks. Eric discovered numerous opportunities for robotics, but one stood out due to its size, scale, and ubiquity: wood waste from construction and demolition.
**The Problem:** While steel and concrete have established reuse and recycling streams, 37 million tons of dimensional wood from construction sites are burned or buried in landfills in the US each year. This represents about half of the virgin softwood dimensional lumber produced for US consumption annually.
**The Cause:** Why couldn’t this wood be easily reused? Metal fasteners. Nails, screws, staples, and other fasteners in the used wood could cause significant damage and potentially injury if they were put back through the milling process. The saws, planers, and other equipment are designed to easily cut and process wood, not metal.
**The Solution:** Use robots to quickly and efficiently remove the metal from the used wood, certify its status as 'metal-free' with a metal detector, and then return it to the lumber supply.
Eric partnered with Andrew Gillies and Alex Thiele to create a robot that removes metal so the wood can be reused, and a company to commercialize it. The result is Urban Machine.
Join us as we dive into the intersection of robotics, construction, and sustainability. Eric and his team are using technology behind the headlines—artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, etc.—to economically do the dirty job of removing nails, screws, and fasteners, so the lumber can reenter the market and stay out of the incinerator or landfill.
Eric Law: Lumber, Robotics, Innovation, Sustainability | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep31
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxx8g-YHDqU&list=PLZURvMqWbYjk4hbmcR46tNDdXQlrVZgEn
Transcript and show notes - https://www.turnthelenspodcast.com/episode/eric-law-lumber-robotics-innovation-sustainability-turn-the-lens-with-jeff-frick-ep31
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