MassRobotics collaborated with the MIT Engine to participate in Tough Tech Week – October 27 – 31, 2025. We presented a half-day session on Physical AI and invited 12 of our resident startups to participate in the annual Demo Day.
The “Physical AI: Mind in Motion” session began with a welcome kick-off led by Tom Ryden, introducing the MassRobotics mission and outlining the goals for exploring innovation in the physical AI ecosystem. The morning continued with a fireside chat featuring Gilwoo Lee, Founder & COO at Zordi & Oded Maron, Head of Physical AI at MassRobotics. Gilwoo discussed the journey of building a startup in the physical AI universe, tackling topics such as shaping business models, securing funding, choosing technologies, and building strong teams.
The fireside chat was followed by a MassRobotics Resident Startup Panel moderated by Oded and featuring Krishna Gopalakrishnan (Luminous), Brian Hart (Black-I Robotics), and Xinyu Wang (Whelix, formerly Mito). The panel explored non-humanoid robot form factors, highlighting how diverse designs can enable new capabilities and markets within Physical AI.
The event wrapped up with a keynote talk by Russ Tedrake, Professor at MIT and Senior Vice President at Toyota Research Institute, titled “Learning Dexterous Manipulation: All Hype? Or Production Ready?” Russ delved into the state of learning-based manipulation, and showed how learning across multiple tasks can help system quickly and robustly acquire capabilities on a new task, and discussed the prospect of deploying such technologies in production environments.
🎥 Watch the recording here