Teddy Warner, 19 years old, has always had an interest in robotics. He says his family was in the industry and that he “grew-up” working in a machine shop in high school. Warner has now built his own robotics company, Intempus. It aims to make robots more human.
Intempus has developed a technology to retrofit existing robots so that they can express emotions similar to humans. This will help humans to better interact with machines and predict their movements. These robots will be able to produce data that can also be used to train AI models. Warner told TechCrunch that these robots would express themselves through kinetic movements. Warner stated that humans derive many of their subconscious signals from their arms and torso, not the face or semantics. “This applies to dogs, cats and other animals who aren’t human.”
Warner stated that he came up with the idea for Intempus when he worked at AI research lab Midjourney. He said that Midjourney was working with other AI research labs on world AI models. These are AI models which understand and make decisions using the dynamics and spatial properties of the real world, rather than just cause and effects. Warner realized that it would be difficult for these models, which were being trained with data from robots who didn’t possess spatial reasoning either, to achieve this.
Warner explained that robots go from A-C, which is observation to action. Humans, and all living beings, have an intermediate B step, which we call physiological state. “Robots do not have physiological state. They don’t enjoy themselves, and they don’t experience stress. We have to give robots this B-step if we want them to be able communicate with humans as we do, in a way which is innate, less uncanny and more predictable. He began by using fMRI data to measure brain activity. This is done by detecting changes in oxygen and blood flow. But it didn’t work. His friend suggested he try a polygraph, which captures sweat data. He started to see some success.
Warner said, “I was surprised at how quickly I went from capturing sweat for myself and my friends to training this model which can essentially allow robots have an emotional composition based solely on sweat data.”
He’s since expanded from sweat data into other areas, like body temperature, heart rate, and photoplethysmography, which measures the blood volume changes in the microvascular level of the skin, among others.
Warner started Intempus in 2024, and spent the first 4 months on research. He has spent the last few months on a mixture of building emotional capabilities for robots, and engaging potential clients. He’s already signed up seven enterprise robotics partnerships. Intempus is a part of Peter Thiel’s current cohort.
Thiel Fellowship Programgives young entrepreneurs $200,000 in two years to dropout of school and start their own companies.
Warner stated that the next step for Intempus was to hire – he has done everything up to now as a one-man team — and to get some of the technology that’s been built in front humans to begin testing. Warner said that while Intempus currently focuses on retrofitting current robots, he would never rule out the possibility of Intempus creating its own emotionally intelligent robotics in future. Warner said, “I have a lot of robots and they run a lot of emotions. I want someone to come in and understand that this robot has a joyful intent. If I can innately communicate some emotion, I will have done my job well.” “I think I can really prove that I have done this in the next four to five months.”
Becca, a senior writer for TechCrunch, covers venture capital trends, startups, and other topics. She covered the same beat previously for Forbes and Venture Capital Journal.
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