2026-04-04 00:30:01
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Getting Digit to dance takes more than putting on some fancy shoes–our AI Team can teach Digit new whole-body control capabilities overnight. Using raw motion data from mocap, animation, and teleop methods, Digit gets new skills through sim-to-real reinforcement training.
[ Agility ]
We’ve created GEN-1, our latest milestone in scaling robot learning. We believe it to be the first general-purpose AI model that crosses a new performance threshold: mastery of simple physical tasks. It improves average success rates to 99% on tasks where previous models achieve 64%, completes tasks roughly 3x faster than state of the art, and requires only 1 hour of robot data for each of these results. GEN-1 unlocks commercial viability across a broad range of applications—and while it cannot solve all tasks today, it is a significant step towards our mission of creating generalist intelligence for the physical world.
[ Generalist ]
Unitree open-sources UnifoLM-WBT-Dataset—high-quality real-world humanoid robot whole-body teleoperation (WBT) dataset for open environments. Publicly available since March 5, 2026, the dataset will continue to receive high-frequency rolling updates. It aims to establish the most comprehensive real-world humanoid robot dataset in terms of scenario coverage, task complexity, and manipulation diversity.
[ Hugging Face ]
Autonomous mobile robots operating in human-shared indoor environments often require paths that reflect human spatial intentions, such as avoiding interference with pedestrian flow or maintaining comfortable clearance. This paper presents MRReP, a Mixed Reality-based interface that enables users to draw a Hand-drawn Reference Path (HRP) directly on the physical floor using hand gestures.
[ MRReP ]
Thanks, Masato!
Eye contact, even momentarily between strangers, plays a pivotal role in fostering human connection, promoting happiness, and enhancing belonging. Through autonomous navigation and adaptive mirror control, Mirrorbot facilitates serendipitous, non-verbal interactions by dynamically transitioning reflections from self-focused to mutual recognition, sparking eye contact, shared awareness, and playful engagement.
[ ARL ] via [ Cornell University ]
Experience PAL Robotics’ new teleoperation system for TIAGo Pro, the AI-ready mobile manipulator designed for advanced research. This real-time VR teleoperation setup allows precise control of TIAGo Pro’s dual arms in Cartesian space, ideal for remote manipulation, AI data collection, and robot learning.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Utter brilliance from Robust AI. No notes.
[ Robust AI ]
Come along with our Senior Test Engineer, Nick L., as he takes us on a tour of the Home Test Labs inside the iRobot HQ.
[ iRobot ]
By automating the final “magic 5%” of production—the precise trimming of swim goggles’ silicone gaskets based on individual face scans—UR cobots allow THEMAGIC5 to deliver affordable, custom-fit goggles, enabling the company to scale from a Kickstarter sensation to selling over 400,000 goggles worldwide.
[ Universal Robots ]
Sanctuary AI has once again demonstrated its industry-leading approach to training dexterous manipulation policies for its advanced hydraulic hands. In this video, their proprietary hydraulic hand autonomously manipulates a lettered cube, continuously reorienting it to match a specified goal (displayed in the bottom-left corner of the video).
[ Sanctuary AI ]
China’s Yuxing 3-06 commercial experimental satellite, the first of its kind to be equipped with a flexible robotic arm, has recently completed an in-orbit refueling test and verification of key technologies. The test paves the way for Yuxing 3-06, dubbed a “space refueling station,” to refuel other satellites in orbit, manage space debris, and provide other in-orbit services.
[ Sanyuan Aerospace ] via [ Space News ]
This is a demonstration of natural walking, whole-body teleoperation, and motion tracking with our custom-built humanoid robot. The control policies are trained using large-scale parallel reinforcement learning (RL). By deploying robust policies learned in a physics simulator onto the real hardware, we achieve dynamic and stable whole-body motions.
[ Tokyo Robotics ]
Faced with aging railway infrastructure, a shrinking workforce and rising construction costs, Japan Railway West asked construction innovator Serendix to replace an old wooden building at its Hatsushima railway station using its 3D printing technology. An ABB robot enabled the company to assemble the new building in a single night ready for the first train service the next day.
[ ABB ]
Humanoid, SAP, and Martur Fompak team up to test humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing logistics. This joint proof of concept explores how robots can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and shape the future of smart factories.
[ Humanoid ]
This MIT Robotics Seminar is from Dario Floreano at EPFL, on “Avian Inspired Drones.”
[ MIT ]
This MIT Robotics Seminar is from Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley, on “Good Old-Fashioned Engineering Can Close the 100,000 Year “Data Gap” in Robotics.”
[ MIT ]
2026-04-03 21:00:02
This year marks the 80th anniversary of ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer. The computer was built during World War 2 to speed up ballistics calculations, but its contributions to computing extend well beyond military applications.
Two of ENIAC’s key architects—John W. Mauchly, its co-inventor, and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, one of the six original programmers—married a few years after its completion and raised seven children together. Mauchly and McNulty’s grandchild Naomi Most delivered a talk as part of a celebration in honor of ENIAC’s anniversary on 15 February, which was held online and in-person at the American Helicopter Museum in West Chester, Pa. The following is adapted from that presentation.
There was a library at my grandparents’ farmhouse that felt like it went on forever. September light through the windows, beech leaves rustling outside on the stone porch, the sounds of cousins and aunts and uncles somewhere in the house. And in the corner of that library, an IBM personal computer.
When I spent summers there as a child, I didn’t yet know that the computer was closely tied to my family’s story.
My grandparents are known for their contributions to creating the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. But both were interested in more than just crunching numbers: My grandfather wanted to predict the weather. My grandmother wanted to be a good storyteller.
In Irish, the first language my grandmother Kathleen “Kay” McNulty ever spoke, a word existed to describe both of these impulses: ríomh.
I began to learn the Irish language myself five years ago, and I was struck by how certain words and phrases had multiple meanings. According to renowned Irish cultural historian Manchán Magan—from whom I took lessons—the word ríomh has at different times been used to mean to compute, but also to weave, to narrate, or to compose a poem. That one word that can tell the story of ENIAC, a machine with wires woven like thread that was built to compute, make predictions, and search for a signal in the noise.
Before working on ENIAC, John Mauchly spent years collecting rainfall data across the United States. His favorite pastime was meteorology, and he wanted to find patterns in storm systems to predict the weather.
The Army, however, funded ENIAC to make simpler predictions: calculating ballistic trajectory tables. Start there, co-inventors J. Presper Eckert and Mauchly realized, and perhaps the weather would soon be computable.
Co-inventors John Mauchly (left) and J. Presper Eckert look at a portion of ENIAC on 25 November 1966. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Weather is a system unfolding through time, and a model of a storm is a story about how that system might unfold. There’s an old Irish saying related to this idea: Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir. Literally, “weather is a good storyteller.” But aimsir also means time. So the usual translation of this phrase into English becomes “time will tell.”
Mauchly wanted to ríomh an aimsire—to weave the weather into pattern, to compute the storm, to narrate the chaos. He realized that complex systems don’t reveal their full purpose at conception. They reveal it through aimsir—through weather, through time, through use.
Kathleen “Kay” McNulty was born on 12 February 1921, in Creeslough, on the night her father—an IRA training officer—was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Gaol.
Family oral history holds that her people were weavers. She spoke only Irish until her family reached Philadelphia when she was four years old, entering American school the following year knowing virtually no English. She graduated in 1942 from Chestnut Hill College with a mathematics degree, was recruited to compute artillery firing tables by hand for the U.S. Army, and was then selected—along with five other women—to program ENIAC.
They had no manual. They had only blueprints.
McNulty and her colleagues learned ENIAC and its quirks the way you learn a loom: by touch, by memory, by routing threads of electricity into patterns. They developed embodied knowledge the designers could only approximate. They could narrow a malfunction to a specific failed vacuum tube before any technician could locate it.
McNulty and Mauchly are also credited with conceiving the subroutine, the sequence of instructions that can be repeatedly recalled to perform a task, now essential in any programming. The subroutine was not in ENIAC’s blueprints, nor in the funding proposal. The concept emerged as highly determined people extended their imagination into the machine’s affordances.
The engineers designed the loom. Weavers discovered its true capabilities.
In 1950, four years after ENIAC was switched on, Mauchly’s dream was realized as it was used in the world’s first computer-assisted weather forecast. That was made possible after Klara von Neumann and Nick Metropolis reassembled and upgraded the ENIAC with a small amount of digital program memory. The programmers who transformed the math into operational code for the ENIAC were Norma Gilbarg, Ellen-Kristine Eliassen, and Margaret Smagorinsky. Their names are not as well known as they should be.
Before programming ENIAC, Kay McNulty (left) was recruited by the U.S. Army to compute artillery firing tables. Here, she and two other women, Alyse Snyder and Sis Stump, operate a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations in the basement of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering.University of Pennsylvania
Kay married John Mauchly in 1948, describing him as “the greatest delight of my life. He was so intelligent and had so many ideas... He was not only lovable, he was loving.” She spent the rest of her life ensuring he, Eckert, and the ENIAC programmers would be recognized.
When she died in 2006, I came to her funeral in shock, not fully knowing what I’d lost. As she drifted away, it was said, she had been reciting her prayers in Irish. This understanding made it quickly over to Creeslough, Donegal, and awaited me when I visited to honor her memory with the dedication of a plaque right there in the center of town.
In her own memoir, she wrote: “If I am remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as my family storyteller.”
In Irish, the word for computer is ríomhaire. One who ríomhs. One who weaves, computes, and tells. My grandfather wanted to tell the story of the weather through computing. My grandmother wanted to be remembered as a storyteller. The language of her childhood already had a word that contained both of those ambitions.
When it was built, ENIAC looked like the back room of a textile production house. Panels. Switchboards. A room full of wires. Thread.
Thread does not tell you what it will become. We tend to think of computing as calculation—discrete and deterministic. But a model is a structured story about how something behaves.
Weather models, ballistic tables, economic forecasts, neural networks: These are all narrative engines, systems that take raw inputs and produce accounts of how the world might unfold. In complex systems, when parts are woven together through use, new structures arise that no one specified in advance.
Like ENIAC, the machines we are building now—the large models, the autonomous systems—are not merely calculators. They are looms.
Their most important properties will not be specified in advance. They will emerge through use, through the people who learn how to weave with them.
Through imagination.
Through aimsir.
2026-04-03 02:00:02
Abhishek Appaji has committed his career to bringing lifesaving technology to underresourced communities. The IEEE senior member weaves together artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, deep learning, and neuroscience to make doctors’ jobs easier and to improve patient outcomes.
“The intersection of these fields is where the most impactful breakthroughs in diagnostic precision occur,” says Appaji, an associate professor of medical electronics engineering at the B.M.S. College of Engineering, in Bengaluru, India.
Employer
B.M.S. College of Engineering, in Bengaluru, India
Job title
Associate professor of medical electronics engineering
Member grade
IEEE senior member
Alma maters
B.M.S. College of Engineering; University of Visvesvaraya, in Bengaluru; Maastricht University, in the Netherlands
Many of his inventions have been deployed in remote areas of India, providing physicians with quality diagnostic tools, including an AI-powered machine that can scan retinas to detect medical conditions and a smart bed that continuously monitors a patient’s vital signs.
An active volunteer with the IEEE Young Professionals Bangalore Section, he has launched professional networking events, technology workshops, a mentorship program, and other initiatives.
For his “contributions to accessible AI-driven health care solutions and leadership in empowering young professionals,” Appaji is the recipient of this year’s IEEE Theodore W. Hissey Outstanding Young Professional Award. The honor is sponsored by the IEEE Photonics and Power & Energy societies as well as IEEE Young Professionals. The award is scheduled to be presented this month during the IEEE Honors Ceremony in New York City.
“This award represents a significant milestone in my career,” Appaji says. “It validates my core belief that our success as engineers is not solely measured by research outcomes or publications but by the tangible impact we have on lives through accessible technology and the quality of the next generation of leaders we empower.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering from B.M.S. in 2010, he joined the school as a lecturer in its medical electronics engineering department. At the same time, he pursued master’s degrees in bioinformatics at the University Visvesvarya College of Engineering, also in Bengaluru. He graduated in 2013 and continued to teach at B.M.S.C.E.
Four years later, Appaji signed up for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, a two-week intensive hybrid program that includes webinars, online courses, and a five-day stay at MIT. It’s designed to give teams of aspiring entrepreneurs, innovators, and early-stage founders the structured mindset, tools, and frameworks they need to succeed.
Appaji says he discovered the program while researching opportunities in innovation.
“I had the technical expertise, but I needed a structured framework to transition my research from the laboratory to the market,” he says.
During the MIT boot camp, he and a team of four other participants were tasked with approaching a complex health care challenge. They developed a noninvasive blood glucose measurement device to manage gestational diabetes—a condition that causes high blood sugar and insulin resistance during pregnancy. When the program ended, Appaji and two of his Australia-based teammates continued their collaboration by founding Glucotek in Brisbane, Australia.
Inspired to continue his research in health care technology, Appaji pursued a doctorate in mental health and neurosciences at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands.
His thesis focused on computational methods to identify retinal vascular patterns.
“The patterns we analyze—including the curvature of the vessels, the angles at which they branch out, and their dimensions—reveal the health of the microvascular system,” he says. “With conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, microvascular changes mirror neurovascular changes in the brain.”
“My journey has shown me that IEEE is much more than a professional society; it is a global platform that allows me to collaborate with a diverse network of experts to solve local humanitarian challenges.”
Examining and measuring the retinal vascular system offers physicians a noninvasive way to examine neural changes, which can be biomarkers for psychiatric illnesses, he says.
To bring his idea to life, he collaborated with an ophthalmologist, a psychiatrist, and colleagues from his engineering school to develop a screening device. They also created and trained the AI models that analyze retinal images.
Ideas from his thesis led to the creation of the Smart Eye Kiosk, an AI-powered tool that scans the network of small veins that deliver blood to the inner retina. The tool monitors stress levels and mental health. It also screens for basic eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, as well as damage to retinal blood vessels caused by high blood sugar.
Retinal images also can reveal physiological changes in the brain associated with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Appaji says. The kiosk uses AI models to analyze measurements of the vasculature network, such as vessel thickness, which can be biomarkers for psychiatric conditions. Since mental illnesses can be linked to genetics, relatives of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were also invited to participate in a study funded by India’s Cognitive Science Research Initiative’s Department of Science & Technology. The clinical data from this study can pave the way for earlier, more accurate diagnoses.
“The biological basis for this is fascinating,” Appaji says. “The retina is the only place in the human body where the central nervous system and the vascular system can be visualized directly and noninvasively. Anatomically, the retina is an extension of the posterior part of the brain. Therefore, physiological changes in the brain are often reflected in the eyes.”
This kiosk was developed in collaboration with Tan Tock Seng Hospital and Nanyang Technological University, which was funded by Ng Teng Fong Healthcare Innovation Program.
He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from Maastricht, and he received the Best Thesis Award from the university’s Mental Health and Neuroscience Research Institute. Appaji credits his time at the school for his multidisciplinary approach to developing medical devices.
“Having the perspectives of mentors from diverse fields was essential to help me move my research beyond theory into a data-driven diagnostic tool,” he says.
He was then named institutional coordinator of R&D at B.M.S. and later was promoted to be its head.
Abhishek Appaji working on a smart bed sensor that continuously monitors a patient’s vital signs without the use of wires or wearable sensors.Abhishek Appaji
Appaji continues to develop technologies for patients who need them most. “I feel a deep need to bridge this gap and ensure innovations have a tangible impact on society,” he says. In addition to the Smart Eye Kiosk, he improved the performance of the sensors of the smart beds that continuously monitor a patient’s vital signs without the use of wires or wearable sensors. The beds help hospital staff check on their patients in a noninvasive way.
The project was done in collaboration with health AI company Dozee (Turtle Shell Technologies) in Bengaluru. The system measures mechanical microvibrations produced by the body in response to the ejection of blood into the aorta, which occurs with each heartbeat. A thin, industrial-grade sensor sheet is placed underneath the mattress. Additional funding is being provided by India’s Department of Science and Technology.
“These sensors are incredibly sensitive,” Appaji says. “They pick up minute mechanical tremors through the mattress material.”
The sensors detect the force of the patient’s heartbeat and the expansion and contraction of their chest during respiration. The vibrations are converted into electrical signals and analyzed using deep learning algorithms developed by Appaji and his team at the university in collaboration with Dozee.
The technology is used in more than 200 hospitals throughout India and in thousands of households, he says.
Appaji is also executive director of the BMSreenivasiah Innovators Guild Foundation, dedicated to nurturing entrepreneurial talent among students and faculty across the BMS group of Institutions. A not-for-profit company promoted by the BMS Education Trust, BIG Foundation provides a structured ecosystem for innovation, incubation, and startup growth.
There, Appaji mentors budding entrepreneurs, offering advice on business plans, product pitches, marketing strategies, and licensing. Participants are students and faculty members.
The foundation has incubated more than 10 ventures, according to Appaji.
“The majority are centered on health care applications,” he says, “and have successfully secured backing from investors and seed funds.”
Appaji was introduced to IEEE as an undergraduate when one of his professors encouraged him to volunteer for a conference sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. He transcribed the seminars for session chairs, assisted with managing the talks, and helped answer attendees’ questions.
“That experience was transformative,” he recalls. “I was amazed to find myself in the same room with the speakers and scientists who had authored the very textbooks I was studying.
“It was then that I realized IEEE is far more than just technology and volunteering; it is a global platform for high-level networking with world-class scientists and technologists.”
Appaji has served in several IEEE leadership positions, including 2018–2019 chair of the Young Professionals Bangalore Section. He is now treasurer of the IEEE Education Society, chair of IEEE Computer Society Bangalore Chapter, member of the steering committee of IEEE DataPort, and serves on the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities and IEEE Educational Activities boards.
“What motivates me to remain active within IEEE is the profound alignment between my personal goals and the organizational mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity,” he says. “My journey has shown me that IEEE is much more than a professional society; it is a global platform that allows me to collaborate with a diverse network of experts to solve local humanitarian challenges.”
The organization has helped fund some of Appaji’s lifesaving work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he received a grant from the IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board and Region 10 to develop 3D-printed protective equipment for people in Bengaluru’s underserved communities. The virus spread quickly in the high-density areas, where social distancing was nearly impossible. The kits, which included a door opener to avoid high-touch surfaces and an elbow-operated soap dispenser, were sent to nearly 500 households.
“This work remains one of my most meaningful contributions to humanitarian technology,” Appaji says, “demonstrating how engineering can be rapidly deployed to protect vulnerable populations during a global crisis.”
He advises younger IEEE members to: “Say yes to taking on roles of responsibility. Don’t wait for a formal title to lead; instead, start by volunteering to do small, manageable tasks within your local chapter or section.”
“The networking opportunities and leadership skills you gain through these early responsibilities will shape your professional career far more than any textbook ever could.”
2026-04-01 21:00:01
It’s easy to assume that Robert Woo was defined by the accident that took away his ability to walk.
Certainly, the day of his accident—14 December 2007—was a turning point. Woo, an architect working on the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City, hadn’t attended his company’s holiday party the night before, and that morning he was the only one in the trailer that served as the construction-site office. He was bent over his laptop when, 30 floors above, a crane’s nylon sling gave way, sending about 6 tonnes of steel plummeting toward the trailer. The roof collapsed, folding Woo in half and smashing his face into his laptop, which smashed through his desk.
“I was conscious throughout the whole ordeal,” Woo remembers. “It was an out-of-body experience. I could hear myself screaming in pain. I could hear the voices of the rescue workers. I heard one firefighter say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re getting to you.’” The rescue workers hauled him out of the rubble and got him to the emergency room in 18 minutes flat; with one lung crushed and the other punctured, he wouldn’t have lasted much longer. In those frantic early moments, a doctor told him that he might be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. He remembers asking the doctors to let him die.
Woo simply couldn’t imagine how a paralyzed version of himself could continue living his life. Then 39 years old, he worked long hours and jetted around the world to supervise the construction of skyscrapers. More important, he had two young boys, ages 6 months and 2 years. “I couldn’t see having a life while being paralyzed from the neck down, not being able to teach my boys how to play ball,” he recalls. “What kind of life would that be?”
Robert Woo walks inside the Wandercraft facility in New York City using the company’s latest self-balancing exoskeleton. Nicole Millman
But in a Manhattan showroom last May, Woo showed that he’s not defined by that accident, which left him paralyzed from the chest down, but with the use of his arms. Instead, he has defined himself by how he has responded to his injury, and the new life he built after it.
In the showroom, Woo transferred himself from his wheelchair to a 80-kilogram (176-pound) exoskeleton suit. After strapping himself in, he manipulated a joystick in his left hand to rise from a chair and then proceeded to walk across the room on robotic legs. Woo’s steps were short but smooth, and he clanked as he walked.
This exoskeleton, from the French company Wandercraft, is one of the first to let the user walk without arm braces or crutches, which most other models require to stabilize the user’s upper body. The battery-powered exoskeleton took care of both propulsion and balance; Woo just had to steer. The bulky apparatus had a backplate that extended above Woo’s head, a large padded collar, armrests, motorized legs, and footplates. Walking across the room, he appeared to be half man, half machine. On the other side of the showroom’s plate-glass window, on Park Avenue, a kid walking by with his family came to a dead halt on the sidewalk, staring with awe at the cyborg inside.
Robert Woo prepares to walk in a Wandercraft exoskeleton; the device’s controller enables him to stand up, initiate walk mode, and choose a direction. Bryan Anselm/Redux
The amazement on the boy’s face was reminiscent of Woo’s young sons’ reaction when they saw a photo of Woo trying out an early exoskeleton, back in 2011. “Their first comment was, ‘Oh, Daddy’s in an Iron Man suit,’” he remembers. Then they asked, “When are you going to start flying?” To which Woo replied, “Well, I’ve got to learn how to walk first.”
The title of exoskeleton superhero suits Woo. He’s as soft-spoken and mild-mannered as Clark Kent, with a smile that lights up his face. Yet the strength underneath is undeniable; he has built a new life out of sheer determination.
For 15 years, he’s been a test pilot, early adopter, and clinical-study subject for the most prominent exoskeletons under development around the world. He placed the first order for an exoskeleton that was approved for home use, and he learned what it was like to be Iron Man around the house. Throughout it all, he has given the companies detailed feedback drawn from both his architectural design skills and his user experience. He has shaped the technology from inside of it.
Saikat Pal, a researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, met Woo during clinical trials for Wandercraft’s first model. Like so many others in the field, Pal quickly recognized that Woo brought a lot to the table. “He’s a super-mega user of exoskeletons: very enthusiastic, very athletic,” Pal says. “He’s the perfect subject.”
By pushing the technology forward, Woo has paved the way for thousands of people with spinal cord injuries as well as other forms of paralysis, who are now benefiting from exoskeletons in rehab clinics and in their homes. “Our bionics program at Mount Sinai started with Robert Woo,” says Angela Riccobono, the director of rehabilitation neuropsychology at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City, where Woo became an outpatient after his accident. “We have a plaque that dedicates our bionics program to him.”
Robert Woo walks down a sidewalk in New York City in 2015 using a ReWalk exoskeleton, one of the first exoskeletons designed for use outside the rehab clinic. Eliza Strickland
It’s a fitting tribute. Woo’s post-accident life has been marked by victories, frustrations, deep love, and one devastating loss, and yet he has continued to devote himself to bionics. And while his vision for exoskeletons hasn’t changed, experience has reshaped what he expects from them in his lifetime.
Long before Woo ever stood up in a robotic suit, he had developed the habits of mind that would later make him an unusually perceptive test pilot.
Woo has always been a builder, a tinkerer, a fixer. Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, he put together model kits of battleships and airplanes without looking at the instructions. “I just put things together the way I thought it would work out,” he says. He trained as an architect and in 2000 joined the Toronto-based firm Adamson Associates Architects, a job that soon had him traveling to Europe and Asia to work on corporate high-rises.
Adamson specializes in taking the stunning designs of visionary architects and turning them into practical buildings with elevators and bathrooms. “Most of the design architects don’t really have a clue about how to build buildings,” Woo says. He liked solving those problems; he liked reconciling beautiful designs with the stubborn reality of construction. That talent for understanding a structure from the inside and spotting the flaws would prove essential later.
After his accident, Woo had two major surgeries to stabilize his crushed spine, which required surgeons to cut through muscles and nerves that connected to his arms. For two months, he couldn’t feel or move his arms; there was a chance he never would again. Only when sensation began creeping back into his fingertips did he allow himself to imagine a different future. If he wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down, he thought, maybe more of his body could be brought back online. “My focus was to walk again,” he says.
Woo was discharged in March 2008 and went back to his New York City apartment. He was still bedridden and required around-the-clock care. He doesn’t much like to talk about this next part: By May, his then-wife had moved back to Canada and filed for divorce, asking for full custody of their two children. Woo remembers her saying, “I can’t look after three babies, and one of them for life.”
It was a dark time. Riccobono of Mount Sinai, who met Woo shortly after he became an outpatient there in 2008, recalls the despondent look on his face the first time they talked. “I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to take his life, to be honest,” she says. “He felt like he had nothing to live for.”
Angela Riccobono of Mount Sinai Hospital (left) credits Woo with jump-starting the hospital’s bionics program; a plaque in the department of rehabilitation medicine recognizes his role.
Yet Woo harbors no animosity toward his ex-wife. “If we hadn’t separated and gone through the custody hearing, I don’t think I would have gotten this far,” he says. To win partial custody of his children, Woo had to become independent. He had to get off narcotic pain medications, regain strength, and learn how to navigate life in a wheelchair. He had to show that he no longer needed constant nursing, and that he could take care of both himself and his boys.
There were milestones: learning how to get back into his wheelchair after a fall, learning to drive a car with hand controls, learning to manage his body as it was, not as it had been. The biggest change came when he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, a vivacious woman named Vivian Springer. She was then dividing her time between Toronto and New York City, and she had a son who was almost the same age as Woo’s two boys. Springer had worked in a nursing home and knew how to change the sheets without getting him out of bed; she was currently working in human resources and knew how to deal with insurance companies. “You wouldn’t believe how much stress it lifted off of me,” Woo says. Over time, they became a family.
Robert Woo’s wife, Vivian, was trained in how to operate the device he used at home. His sons, Tristan (left) and Adrien, grew up watching their dad test exoskeletons. Left: Lifeward; Right: Robert Woo
Once Woo had that foundation in place, Riccobono witnessed a profound change. “He went from focusing on ‘what I can’t do anymore’ to ‘What’s still possible? What can I do with what I have?’” At Mount Sinai, Woo remembers asking his doctor Kristjan Ragnarsson, who was then chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine, if he would ever walk again. “His response was, ‘Yes, you can walk again,’” Woo remembers, “‘but not the way you used to walk.’”
As soon as he had regained use of his hands, Woo had started googling, looking for anything that could get him back on his feet. He tried rehab equipment like the Lokomat, which used a harness suspended above a treadmill to enable users to walk. But at the time, it required three physical therapists: one to move each leg and one to control the machine. It was a far cry from the independent strides he dreamed of.
Several years in, he learned about two companies that had built something radically different: exoskeleton suits for people with spinal cord injuries. These prototypes had motors at the knees and the hips to move the legs, with the user stabilizing their upper body with arm braces. Woo desperately wanted to try one, although the technology was still experimental and far from regulatory approval. So he took the idea to Ragnarsson, asking if Mount Sinai could bring an exoskeleton into its rehab clinic for a test drive. Ragnarsson, who’s now retired, remembers the request well. “He certainly gave us the kick in the behind to get going with the technology,” he says.
Robert Woo tries out an early exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he first began testing the technology. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Ragnarsson had seen decades of failed attempts to get paraplegics upright, including “inflatable garments made of the same material the astronauts used when they went to the moon,” he says. All those devices had proved too tiring for the user; in contrast, the battery-powered exoskeletons promised to do most of the work. And he knew the CEO of Ekso Bionics, a Berkeley, Calif.–based company that had built exoskeletons for the military. In 2011, Ekso brought its new clinical prototype to Mount Sinai.
The day came for Woo’s first walk. “I was excited, and I was also scared, because I hadn’t stood up for almost five years,” he remembers. “Standing up for the first time was like floating, because I couldn’t feel my feet.” In that first Ekso model, Woo didn’t control when he stepped forward; instead, he shifted his weight in preparation, and then a physical therapist used a remote control to trigger the step. Woo walked slowly across the room, using a walker to stabilize his upper body, his steps a symphony of clunks and creaks and whirs. He found it mentally and physically exhausting, but the effort felt like progress.
Robert Woo stands using an exoskeleton and embraces his wife, Vivian. Woo says that exoskeleton use has both physical and psychological benefits. Mt. Sinai
Riccobono was there for those first steps, with tears running down her face. “I remembered how he looked the day I first met him, so defeated,” she says. “To see him rise from the chair, to see him rise to a standing position, to see how tall he was, to see him take those first steps—it was beautiful.” Ragnarsson saw clear benefits to the technology. “Any type of walking is good physiologically,” he says. “And it’s a tremendous boost psychologically to stand up and look someone in the eye.” Woo remembers hugging his partner, Springer, and for the first time not worrying about running over her toes with his wheelchair. I first met Woo a few days later, during his third session with the Ekso at Mount Sinai.
Ann Spungen (left), a researcher at a Veterans Affairs hospital, led early clinical trials of exoskeletons. Her research focused on the medical benefits of exoskeleton use. Robert Woo
Later that same year, at a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in the Bronx, Woo got to try a prototype of the world’s other leading exoskeleton: the ReWalk, from the Israeli company of the same name (since renamed Lifeward). VA researchers, led by Ann Spungen, were keen to determine if exoskeleton use had real medical value for veterans with spinal cord injuries. Woo was part of that clinical trial, for which he had more than 70 walking sessions, and he’s since been in many others. But he remembers the first VA trial with the most gratitude. “Dr. Spungen’s first exoskeleton clinical trial really turned things around for me,” he says.
Over the course of the trial’s nine intense months, Woo says he saw noticeable improvements to many facets of his health. “By the end of the trial, I eliminated about three-quarters of my medication intake,” he says, including narcotic pain pills and medication for muscle spasms. He grew fitter, with less body fat, more muscle mass, and lower cholesterol. His circulation improved, he says, causing scrapes and cuts to heal more quickly, and his digestion improved too. The results Woo experienced have generally been borne out in research studies at the VA and elsewhere—exoskeletons aren’t just good for the mind, they’re good for the body.
During the VA trial, Woo began to think of exoskeletons not as miraculous machines, but as works in progress.
Pierre Asselin (right), a biomedical engineer, worked with Robert Woo during clinical trials of exoskeletons. He says Woo was always pushing the limits of the technology. Robert Woo
Pierre Asselin, the biomedical engineer coordinating the VA’s study, watched participants respond very differently to the equipment. “These devices are not the equivalent of walking—you’re tired after walking a mile,” he says. He notes that later models of both the Ekso and ReWalk enabled users to initiate each step through software that recognized when they shifted their weight. Asselin adds that the cognitive load is “like learning to drive a manual transmission car, where at first you’re really struggling to coordinate the clutch and the brake.” Woo picked it up immediately, he remembers.
Robert Woo uses an exoskeleton to reach items in a kitchen cabinet during a test of the device’s utility for everyday tasks. Eliza Strickland
Woo approached the ReWalk the way he had approached buildings in his previous life: He looked inside the structure and found the weak points. An early model left some users with leg abrasions where the straps rubbed—a small injury for most people, but a serious risk for someone who can’t feel a wound forming. Woo suggested better padding and stronger abdominal supports to redistribute the load. He also hated the heavy backpack that carried the battery and computer, so one afternoon he grabbed an old pack, cut off the straps, and rebuilt it into a compact hip-mounted pouch. Then he snapped photos and sent them to the company. The next model arrived with a fanny pack.
Robert Woo sent detailed design sketches as part of his feedback to exoskeleton engineers. Robert Woo
Sometimes his fixes were more ambitious. One Ekso unit that he used at Mount Sinai kept shutting down after 30 minutes. Woo felt the hip motors and found them hot to the touch. “I said, ‘Can I remove these? I’m going to make a really quick fix, okay? Give me a drill and I’ll put a couple of holes in it,” he recalls telling the therapists, proposing to create a DIY heat sink. He wasn’t allowed to modify the prototype, but a year later the company introduced improved cooling around the hip motors. “There is a Robert Woo design on this device,” one therapist told him.
Eythor Bender, who was then the CEO of Ekso, called Woo to thank him for his feedback and invite him to spend a week at Ekso’s headquarters. “There was no lack of engineering power in that building,” says Bender. “But sometimes when you work with engineers, they overlook important things.” Bender says Woo brought both design skills and lived experience to his weeklong residency. “He told the engineers, ‘Guys, this has to be something that people actually like to wear.’”
Ekso Bionics CEO Eythor Bender and Mount Sinai physician Kristjan Ragnarsson were both on hand for Woo’s early trials of the Ekso device. Ragnarsson says he saw physical and psychological benefits of exoskeleton use. Robert Woo
The longer Woo tested, the further ahead he started thinking. With motors only at the hips and knees, every exoskeleton still required crutches. Add powered ankles, he told the Ekso and ReWalk teams, and the suits could balance themselves, freeing the user’s hands. But Woo was ahead of his time. “They said they weren’t going to do that. They weren’t going to change their whole platform,” he remembers. Years later, though, hands-free exoskeletons like those from Wandercraft would emerge built around exactly that principle.
By the mid-2010s, Woo had pushed the technology as far as he could in clinics. What he wanted now was to use an exoskeleton at home.
That milestone came after ReWalk’s exoskeleton became the first to win FDA approval for home use in 2014. ReWalk engineers still remember Woo’s help on the final tests for that personal-use model. It was the end of May in 2015, recalls David Hexner, the company’s vice president of research and development. “He said, ‘Guys, this is great. I’m going to buy it.’”
Woo was the first customer to buy an exoskeleton to bring home, paying US $80,000 out of pocket. His insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, but he was able to make the purchase in part because of a legal settlement after his accident. The home-use model came with a requirement that the user have at least one companion who was fully trained in operating the device. In Woo’s case, that meant that Springer learned to suit him up, realign his balance, and help him if he fell.
On delivery day, two SUVs drove up to a hotel down the street from Woo’s condo in the Toronto area. The technicians hauled two huge boxes into a hotel room and assembled his personal exoskeleton. They took Woo’s measurements, made adjustments, checked the software. This latest version could be controlled by either weight shifting or tapping commands on a smartwatch, and Woo had the app ready. He tested out everything in the hotel room, signed off, and then the technicians drove his robot legs to his home.
That was the start of his golden period with the ReWalk—similar to the excitement many people experience with a new piece of exercise equipment. “I used it every day for a few hours, and then I started logging how many steps I’d done,” Woo says. “My last count was probably just slightly over a million steps,” he says, with half of those steps taken in his home unit and half in training programs and clinical trials.
The ReWalk was the first exoskeleton available for use outside the clinic. Robert Woo’s ReWalk arrived in two large boxes. ReWalk engineers assembled it in a hotel room, and Woo tried it out in the hallway before taking it home. Robert Woo
Tristan, Woo’s eldest son, remembers doing laps with his dad in the condo’s underground parking garage while his dad was training for a 5-kilometer race in New York City. Tristan admits that he had previously been embarrassed about his dad, but training for the race shifted something for him. “I was so used to not wanting to tell people that my dad was in a wheelchair, but then I shared his passion for the training,” he says. “When people would come up to us, I’d tell them about it.”
The ReWalk could turn ordinary moments into small engineering projects. On weekends, Woo would take his boys to the golf course behind their condo and bring a baseball. He had rigged two holsters to the sides of the suit so he could stash a crutch and stand on three points (two legs and one arm) while he pitched or caught. Throw, switch crutches, catch. On the day of his accident, he never thought such a scene would be possible. But with the exoskeleton, it became just another design problem to solve. “It’s a little more work. It’s not perfect,” he says. “But in the end, you still get to do what you want to do—which is play ball with your sons.”
Tristan, now a college student, says he didn’t realize at the time how hard his dad worked to make those mundane activities possible. “Reflecting on it now,” he says, “he has shaped almost every element of my life, and he definitely is my hero.”
But even during that golden stretch, the ReWalk had a way of asserting its limits. Every so often it would freeze mid-stride and require a reboot—a small technical hiccup in theory, but a serious problem when there’s a person strapped inside. Once, when he was walking on his own in the parking garage (without his mandated companion), the suit glitched and went into “graceful collapse” mode, lowering him to a seated position on the ground. Woo had to ask security to bring his wheelchair and a dolly.
He had imagined the exoskeleton would be most useful in the kitchen. Woo loves to cook, and he had pictured himself standing at the stove, looking down into pots, and moving easily between counter and sink. The reality, he found out, was more complicated. “It’s actually very time-consuming and troublesome” to cook in an exoskeleton, he says.
Preparing a meal meant first rolling through the kitchen in his wheelchair to gather every ingredient and utensil, then transferring himself into the ReWalk and moving himself into position at the counter, stopping at just the right moment. “That’s when I fell once,” Woo says. “I collided with the counter and then lost my balance and fell backward.” If all went well, he’d lean either on one crutch or the counter to keep his balance while he worked. But if he’d forgotten to grab the vinegar from the cabinet, he’d have to go into walk mode, crutch over to it, and figure out how to carry the bottle back to his workstation.
Sitting unused in Robert Woo’s home, his ReWalk exoskeleton reflects both the promise and the limits of early devices. Robert Woo
Gradually, he stopped trying. The suit, which he’d once worn every day, spent more time sitting idle in the hallway; like so many abandoned treadmills and stationary bikes, it gathered dust. Part of the reason was the exoskeleton’s practical limitations, but part of it was a shocking development: In 2024, Vivian was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She died in November of that year, at the age of 54.
Woo was scheduled to begin a new round of clinical trials for the Wandercraft home-use exoskeleton that month. In the aftermath of Vivian’s death, he postponed his sessions and questioned whether he would ever go back. “At the time, I thought, ‘What’s the point?’” he remembers.
He did go back, though. “He just rolled up, right into my office,” says Mount Sinai’s Riccobono. “He still had Vivian’s box of ashes on his lap. That’s how fresh it was.” Woo brought the box into a meeting of spinal cord injury patients and shared the story of losing the love of his life. And he told them that he heard his wife’s voice in his head every day, telling him to get back to work. Once again, he was figuring out how to move forward with what he had.
In the Wandercraft showroom last May, Woo steered toward the door to the street, technicians flanking him like spotters. The slope down to the sidewalk was barely an inch high, but everyone tensed. He shifted his weight and took a step forward. The suit halted automatically. He tried again—step, stop; step, stop—as the suit kept detecting the slight decline and a safety feature kicked in. The Wandercraft isn’t yet rated for slopes of more than 2 percent, and even the gentle pitch of Park Avenue was enough to trigger its safeguards. When he finally reached the sidewalk, Woo broke into a grin. A man in the back seat of a stopped Uber leaned out his window, filming.
During testing of the Wandercraft exoskeleton, straps caused an abrasion on Robert Woo’s leg, which he documented as part of his feedback to the company. Robert Woo
Woo had recently completed seven sessions with the Wandercraft at the VA hospital and had been impressed overall. But at the showroom, he rolled up his pants leg to reveal an abrasion on his shin, the result of a strap that had worn away a patch of skin during a long walking session. He would later send Wandercraft a nine-page assessment with photos and a technology wish list, asking the company to work on things like padding, variable walking speeds, and deeper squats.
Wandercraft’s engineers relish that kind of user feedback, says CEO Matthieu Masselin. Exoskeletons are a far more difficult engineering problem than humanoid robots, he explains. “You basically have two systems of equal importance. You know about the robot—it’s fully quantified and measured. But you don’t know what the person is doing, and how the person is moving within the device.”
Since Woo began testing exoskeletons 15 years ago, both the technology and the market have made strides. ReWalk and Ekso won FDA clearance for clinical use in the 2010s, and both now sell home-use versions. The companies have sold thousands of exoskeletons to rehab clinics and personal users, and they see room for growth; in the United States alone, about 300,000 people live with spinal cord injuries, and millions more have mobility impairments from stroke, multiple sclerosis, or other conditions. The VA began supplying devices to eligible veterans in 2015, and Medicare recently established a system for reimbursement, a move that private insurers are beginning to follow. What was once experimental is slowly becoming established.
Researchers who test the devices say the technology still has significant limits. Pal, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, mentions battery life, dexterity, and reliability as ongoing challenges. But, he says with a laugh, “Our bodies have evolved over many millions of years—these machines will need a bit more time.” Pal hopes the companies will keep pushing the technological frontier. “My lifetime goal is to see the day when someone like Robert Woo can wake up in the morning, put this device on, and then live an ordinary life.”
For Woo, the real question about the self-balancing Wandercraft was: Could he cook with it? In the VA hospital’s home mockup, he tried it out in the kitchen, stepping sideways to retrieve items from cabinets and squatting to grab something from the fridge’s lower shelf. For the first time in years, he could work at a counter without leaning on crutches. “The self-standing exoskeleton changes everything,” he says. He imagines a user placing a Thanksgiving turkey on a tray attached to the suit and walking it into the dining room.
Back in the showroom, Woo finishes the demo and brings the suit to a seated position before transferring back to his wheelchair. After so many years of testing prototypes, he’s now realistic about the technology’s timeline. A truly all-day exoskeleton—the kind you live in, the kind that replaces a wheelchair—may be a decade or more away. “It may not be for me,” he says. But that’s no longer the point. He’s thinking about young people who are newly injured, who are lying in hospital beds and trying to imagine how their lives can continue. “This will give them hope.”
2026-03-31 21:00:02
As a kid, I loved the 1980s aquatic adventure show Danger Bay. True to the TV show’s name, danger was always lurking at the Vancouver Aquarium, where the show was set. In one memorable episode, young Jonah and a friend get trapped in a sabotaged mini-submarine, and Jonah’s dad, a marine-mammal veterinarian, comes to the rescue in a bubble-shaped underwater vehicle. Good stuff! Only recently—as in when I started working on this column—did I learn that the rescue vehicle was not a stage prop but rather a real-world research submersible named Deep Rover.
Built in 1984 and launched the following year, Deep Rover was a departure from standard underwater vehicles, which typically required divers to lie in a prone position and look through tiny portholes while tethered to a support ship.
Deep Rover was designed to satisfy human curiosity about the underwater world. As the rover moved freely through the water down to depths of 1,000 meters, the operator sat up in relative comfort in the cab, inside a clear 13-centimeter-thick acrylic bubble with panoramic views—an inverted fishbowl, with the human immersed in breathable air while the sea creatures looked in. Used for scientific research and deepwater exploration, it set a number of dive records along the way.
Submarine designer Graham Hawkes [left] and marine biologist Sylvia Earle [right] came up with the idea for Deep Rover.Alain Le Garsmeur/Alamy
The team behind Deep Rover included U.S. marine biologist Sylvia Earle and British marine engineer and submarine designer Graham Hawkes. Earle and Hawkes’s collaboration had begun in May 1980, when Earle complained to Hawkes about the “stupid” arms on Jim, an atmospheric diving suit; she didn’t realize she was complaining to one of Jim’s designers. Hawkes explained the difficulty of designing flexible joints that could withstand dueling pressures of 101 kilopascals on the inside—that is, the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level—and up to about 4,100 kPa on the outside. But he listened carefully to Earle’s wish list for a useful manipulator. Several months later, he came back with a design for a superbly dexterous arm that could hold a pencil and write normal-size letters.
Earle and Hawkes next turned to designing a one-person bubble sub, which they considered so practical that it would be an easy sell. But after failing to attract funding, they decided to build it themselves. In the summer of 1981, they pooled their resources and cofounded Deep Ocean Technology, setting up shop in Earle’s garage in Oakland, Calif.
Phil Nuytten, a Canadian designer of submersibles and dive systems, engineered Deep Rover.Stuart Westmorland/RGB Ventures/Alamy
They still found that customers weren’t interested in their crewed submersible, though, so they turned to unmanned systems. Their first contract was for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for use in oil-rig inspection, maintenance, and repair. Other customers followed, and they ended up building 10 of these ROVs. In 1983, they returned to their original idea and contracted with the Canadian inventor and entrepreneur Phil Nuytten to engineer Deep Rover.
Nuytten didn’t have to be convinced of the value of the submersible. He had grown up on the water and shared their dream. As a teenager, he opened Vancouver’s first dive shop. He then worked as a commercial diver. He founded the ocean- and research-tech companies Can-Dive Services (in 1965) and Nuytco Research (in 1982), and he developed advanced submersibles as well as diving systems. These included the Newtsuit, an aluminum atmospheric diving suit for use on drilling rigs and salvage operations.
Deep Rover’s first assignment was to boost offshore oil exploration and drilling in eastern Canada. Funding came from the provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the oil companies Petro-Canada and Husky Oil. But the collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s made it uneconomical to operate the submersible. So the rover’s mission broadened to scientific research.
The pilot could operate Deep Rover safely for 4 to 6 hours at a depth of 1,000 meters and speeds of up to 1.5 knots (46 meters per minute). The submersible could be tethered to a support ship or move freely on its own. Two deep-cycle, lead-acid battery pods weighing about 170 kilograms apiece provided power. It had a VHF radio and two frequencies of through-water communications, plus tracking beacons.
From 1987 to 1989, Deep Rover did a series of dives in Oregon’s Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States. During one dive, National Park Service biologist Mark Buktenica [top] collected rock samples.NPS
The rover’s four thrusters—two horizontal fixed aft thrusters and two rotating wing thrusters—could be activated in any combination through microswitches built into the armrest. The pilot navigated using a gyro compass, sonar, and depth gauges (both digital and analog).
Much to Earle’s delight, Deep Rover had two excellent manipulators, each with four degrees of freedom, thus solving the problem that had started her down this path of invention. The pilot controlled the manipulators with a joystick at the end of each armrest. Sensory feedback systems helped the pilot “feel” the force, motion, and touch. The two arms had wraparound jaws and could lift about 90 kg.
If something went wrong, Deep Rover carried five days’ worth of life support stores and had a variety of redundant safety features: oxygen and carbon dioxide monitoring equipment; a halon (breathable) fire extinguisher; a full-face BIBS (built-in breathing system) that tapped into the starboard air bank; and a ground fault-detection system.
If needed, the rover could surface quickly by jettisoning equipment, including the battery pods and a 90-kg drop weight in the forward bay. In dire circumstances, the pressure hull (the acrylic bubble, that is) could separate from the frame, taking with it only its oxygen tanks, strobe, through-water communications, and wing thrusters.
From 1984 to 1992, Deep Rover conducted about 280 dives. It inspected two of the tunnels near Niagara Falls that divert water to the Sir Adam Beck II hydroelectric plant. In California’s Monterey Bay, the rover let researchers film previously unknown deep-sea marine life, which helped establish the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. At Crater Lake National Park, in Oregon, Deep Rover proved the existence of geothermal vents and bacteria mats, leading to the protection of the site from extractive drilling.
Deep Rover was featured in a short film shown at Vancouver’s Expo ’86, the first of several TV and movie appearances. There was Danger Bay. Director James Cameron used an early prototype of the submersible in his 1989 film The Abyss. Deep Rover also made an appearance in Cameron’s 2005 documentary Aliens of the Deep.
In 1992, Deep Rover came to the end of its working life. It now resides at Ingenium, Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, in Ottawa. For a time, Deep Ocean Engineering continued to develop later generations of the submersible. Eventually, though, uncrewed remotely operated and autonomous underwater vehicles became the norm for deep-sea missions, replacing human pilots with sensors and equipment. New ROVs can dive significantly deeper than human-piloted ones, and new cameras are so good that it feels like you’re there…almost. And yet, humans still long to have the personal experience of exploring the depths of the oceans.
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the April 2026 print issue as “All Alone in the Abyss.”
My friends at Ingenium, Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, helpfully provided me with background material on why they decided to acquire Deep Rover. They also published a great blog post about the rover.
Dirk Rosen, executive vice president of engineering at DEEP, published specifications for Deep Rover in his 1986 IEEE paper “Design and Application of the Deep Rover Submersible.”
Sylvia Earle, known affectionately as “Her Deepness,” has written extensively about the ocean depths. I found her book Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995) to be especially enjoyable.
2026-03-31 02:00:02
To stay competitive, many small businesses need advanced wireless communication networks, not only to communicate but also to leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and robotics. Often, however, the businesses lack the technical expertise needed to install, configure, and maintain the systems.
Bhaskara Rallabandi, who spent more than two decades working for major telecom companies, decided to use his expertise to help small businesses. Rallabandi, an IEEE senior member, is an expert certified by the International Council on Systems Engineering.
Cofounder
Bhaskara Rallabandi
Founded
2023
Headquarters
Frisco, Texas
Employees
100
In 2023 he helped found Invences, a telecommunications automation company headquartered in Frisco, Texas.
Invences services include designing, building, and installing data centers, as well as cost-effective and secure wireless, private, IoT, and virtual communications networks.
The company has set up systems for farms, factories, and universities in rural and urban areas including underserved communities. Its mission, Rallabandi says, is to “build autonomous, ethical, and sustainable networks that connect communities intelligently.”
For his work, he was recognized last year for “entrepreneurial leadership in founding and scaling a U.S.-based technology company, advancing innovation in 5G/6G and Open RAN [radio access network], shaping global standards, and inspiring future leaders through mentorship and community impact” with the IEEE-USA Entrepreneur Achievement Award for Leadership in Entrepreneurial Spirit.
He began his telecommunications career in 2009 as a manager and principal network engineer at Verizon’s Innovation Labs in Waltham, Mass. He and his team ran some of the earliest long-term evolution and evolved packet core performance trials. (LTE is the 4G wireless broadband standard for mobile devices. EPC is the IP-based, high-performance core network architecture for 4G LTE networks.)
That work at Innovation Labs, he says, was key to the development of the first 4G systems. It set the stage for scalable, interoperable broadband architectures that underpin today’s 5G and 6G designs.
“We built the first bridge between legacy and cloud-native networks,” he says.
He left in 2011 to join AT&T Labs in Redmond, Wash. As senior manager and principal solutions architect, he oversaw the design, integration, and testing of the company’s next-generation wireless systems. He also led projects that redefined automation of networks and set up cloud computing systems including FirstNet, the nationwide broadband network for first responders, and VoLTE, the first voice-over-video LTE for conducting video calls.
In 2018 Rallabandi was hired as a principal and a senior manager of engineering at Samsung Networks Division’s Technology Solutions Division, in Plano, Texas. He led the development of 5G virtualization and Open RAN initiatives, which enable more flexible, scalable, and efficient large network deployments and interoperability among vendors.
Feeling that he wasn’t reaching his full potential in the corporate world, and to help small businesses, he opted to start his own venture in 2023 with his wife, Lakshmi Rallabandi, a computer science engineer. She is Invences’s CEO, and he is its founding principal and chief technology advisor.
Invences, which is self-funded and employs about 100 people, has more than 50 customers from around the world.
“I wanted to do something more interesting where I could use the knowledge I gained working for these big companies to fill the gaps they overlooked in terms of automation” for small businesses, he says. “I have a team of people who, combined, have 200 years of technology experience.”
The startup builds networks that simplify its clients’ operations and reduce their costs, he says.
Instead of duplicating how major telecom carriers build networks for dense urban areas, he says, his designs reimagine the network architecture to lower its complexity, costs, and operational overhead.
“Connectivity should not be a luxury. Rural communities deserve an infrastructure that fits their needs.”
The systems integrate new technologies such as Open RAN, virtualized RAN, digital twins, telemetry, and advanced analytics. Some networks also incorporate agentic AI, an autonomous system that runs independently of humans and uses AI agents that plan and act across the network. Digital twins evaluate the agent’s decisions before releasing them.
“Autonomy is not about removing humans from the loop,” Rallabandi says. “It is about giving systems the ability to manage complexity so humans can focus on intent and outcomes.”
Rallabandi also has worked on AI-driven telecom observability technologies designed to allow networks to detect anomalies and optimize performance automatically.
He has developed a virtual O-RAN innovation lab, where clients can test the interoperability of their 5G systems, try out their enhancements, run trials of future functions, and experiment with updates.
Invences partnered with Trilogy Networks to build the FarmGrid platform for farms in Fargo, N.D., and Yuma, Ariz. FarmGrid used private 5G networks, edge-computing AI, and digital twins to make the operations more efficient.
“The project connects farms with sensors, analytics platforms, and autonomous equipment to enable precision agriculture, water optimization, and real-time decision-making,” Rallabandi says.
IEEE Senior Member Bhaskara Rallabandi talks about partnering with Trilogy Networks to build the FarmGrid platform for farms in Fargo, N.D., and Yuma, Ariz.TECKNEXUS
Rallabandi says he believes staying involved with IEEE is important to his career development and a way to give back to the profession. He is a frequent invited speaker at IEEE conferences.
He is active with IEEE Future Networks and its Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) initiative. Members of the Future Networks technical community work to develop, standardize, and deploy 5G and 6G networks as well as successive generations.
CTU aims to bridge the digital divide by bringing Internet service to underserved communities. During itsannual challenge, Rallabandi works with the winning students, researchers, and innovators to help them turn their concepts into affordable, cost-effective options.
“CTU represents the best of IEEE,” he says. “It is about taking innovation out of conferences and into communities that need it the most.
“Connectivity should not be a luxury. Rural communities deserve an infrastructure that fits their needs.”
He participates in the recently launched IEEE Future Networks Empowerment Through Mentorship initiative, which helps innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups expand their companies by educating them about finance, marketing, and related concepts.
“IEEE gives me both a voice and a responsibility,” Rallabandi says. “We’re not just developing technology; we are shaping how humanity connects.”