Robotics People

Marc Raibert (born 1949) is a robotics researcher who built the first self-balancing hopping robots, founded Boston Dynamics, and is now executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute.

Wang Xingxing (born 1990) is the founder and chief executive of Unitree, the robotics company behind the AlienGo and Go1 quadruped robots and the H1 humanoid robot.

Rodney Brooks (born 1954) is an Australian-born roboticist who promoted behaviour-based robotics and the subsumption architecture, directed MIT's AI Laboratory and CSAIL, and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who led SpaceX and Tesla, co-founded PayPal's predecessors and OpenAI, and founded xAI, the company behind the Grok models.

Brett Adcock is a founder of several technology companies, including the recruiting platform Vettery, the electric aircraft maker Archer Aviation and the humanoid robotics company Figure AI, where he is chief executive.

Chelsea Finn is a computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University whose research spans meta-learning, deep reinforcement learning and robot learning; she is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Raj Reddy is an Indian-born computer scientist who built the first system capable of continuous speech recognition and led major computing institutions at Carnegie Mellon University. He shared the 1994 ACM Turing Award with Ed Feigenbaum.

Chinese engineer and technology communicator who worked on AI chips and algorithms at Huawei and co-founded the robotics company AgiBot, where he is president and chief technology officer.

Bernt Øyvind Børnich is CEO of 1X Technologies, the robotics company he founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics; its work spans humanoid robots and the Revo1 servo motor.

Sergey Levine is a computer scientist who studies how robots can learn control behaviour from data. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Pieter Abbeel is a UC Berkeley professor who directs the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-directs BAIR; his honors include the ACM Prize in Computing and IEEE Fellow status.

Zhang Bo (born 1935) is a scholar in automatic control and artificial intelligence. He studied and taught at Tsinghua University and helped found the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems.

Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist who co-founded OpenAI in 2015. He later led teams working on GPT models, GitHub Copilot and Codex.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

Chris Urmson is co-founder and chief executive officer of Aurora, the self-driving company he leads. Under him Aurora announced the acquisition of Uber's self-driving unit and put driverless commercial trucks on public roads.

Jesse Levinson is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Zoox, the autonomous ride-hailing company acquired by Amazon, where he continued to lead after the deal.

Kyle Vogt is identified in General Motors' March 2016 announcement as the founder of Cruise Automation, the San Francisco startup GM acquired; the company he founded later ran driverless passenger service in San Francisco until California regulators suspended its permits in October 2023.

Amnon Shashua is the founder of Mobileye, which grew out of his Hebrew University research into single-camera vehicle detection; he has led the company as chief executive since Intel acquired it in 2017.

Ziv Aviram is a co-founder of Mobileye, the company he helped build from its founding in 1999 through its 2014 New York Stock Exchange listing and its 2017 acquisition by Intel.

Aicha Evans is chief executive of Zoox, the autonomous ride-hailing company Amazon acquired, and stayed on to lead it as a standalone business after the deal.

Yu Kai is chief executive and a co-founder of Horizon Robotics, the Chinese smart-driving supplier that listed in Hong Kong on 24 October 2024 under the code 9660.HK.

Karol Hausman is a roboticist working on robot learning, sim-to-real transfer and embodied AI. He was a senior research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, is an adjunct professor at Stanford, and co-founded Physical Intelligence.

Cao Xudong, a former Microsoft researcher, founded Momenta, a physical AI company, in 2016 and leads it as chief executive; he took it public in Hong Kong in 2026 and now points it toward robots.