Jeff Cardenas pulls out his MacBook. Apptronik’s co-founder and CEO has a slideshow he wants to show, running down the Austin startup’s seven-year history. It does, indeed, take a bit of contextualizing. Like many fellow robotics firms, the company was fueled by government contracts in its earliest days.
First up was Valkyrie 2, the second iteration of NASA’s humanoid space robot. The young company was one of a handful tasked with helping to bring that system to life. Its contribution to the puzzle was liquid-cooled robotic actuators developed at the Human Centered Robots lab at the University of Texas, led by Apptronik co-founder and chief scientist Luis Sentis.
Next was exoskeletons. United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which was in the market for “iron man suits.”
