Episode 236 of The Robot Report Podcast features Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. In addition, Brianna Wessling, associate editor for The Robot Report, recaps her recent trip to NVIDIA GTC in San Jose, Calif.
Sofman describes Bedrock Robotics’ mission to develop autonomy technologies for construction equipment like excavators and bulldozers, as the San Francisco-based company aims to make them fully operatorless.
He shares insights from his experience at Waymo, highlighting parallels between autonomous vehicles and the automation of heavy machinery. Sofman also discusses the market opportunities in construction and the challenge of integrating AI with existing machinery.
In addition, Boris explains the importance of safety and his company‘s immediate goals, including moving from supervised autonomy to fully autonomous deployments.
Show timeline
- 0:30 – Brianna Wessling recaps GTC 2026
- 12:02 – News of the week
- 25:10 – Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics
News of the week
Ottobot makes deliveries at a remote mine village in Australia
Ottobot will be trialled by Sodexo Australia at Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri village in Australia. | Credit: Ottonomy
Residents and guests at a remote mining village in Western Australia’s Pilbara region may soon be served by a new apprentice – an Ottobot robot delivering food and other items directly to their accommodations.
Rio Tinto wanted to reduce the number of support staff onsite while improving overhead and logistics. Sodexo Australia, which has 5,000 employees across more than 100 sites, plans to trial the system at the mining company’s Gudai-Darri village, north-east of Newman in Pilbara.
The residents live in a secluded village while working at the mining site. Food service for the residents is provided onsite by Sodexo, including several restaurants and a general store.
IntBot bets the future of humanoids on social intelligence, not kung fu
Front Desk Information Concierge assisted GTC26 visitors with event information. | Credit: The Robot Report
In just over a year, IntBot has gone from concept to full‑body humanoids greeting thousands of guests at NVIDIA’s GTC and in hotel lobbies. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup has used 24/7 interaction footage and sentiment analysis to train a social intelligence engine that sits on top of off‑the‑shelf hardware.
At GTC 2026, CEO Lei Yang announced that the company‘s IntEng “general social intelligence engine” now supports multiple humanoid and service robots from different hardware vendors. He said this marked a significant step toward hardware-agnostic deployment of socially intelligent robots in real-world environments.
Brightpick launches Gridpicker for high-throughput fulfillment
While automated storage and retrieval systems, or ASRS, are well-established, new technologies promise to increase throughput. Brightpick this week unveiled Gridpicker, a fulfillment system that uses a grid framework, artificial intelligence, and mobile manipulators built on its Autopicker technology.
“We created Autopicker to help operators achieve major cost and labor savings while keeping operations flexible,” stated Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick. “As deployments scaled, we saw that a large segment of the market, mostly high-volume fulfillment centers, needed far more throughput and performance than AMR systems could deliver.”
“So we created Gridpicker by essentially taking our Autopicker robots and placing them on a high-density grid,” he added. “It delivers shuttle-level performance with AMR-level simplicity at 40% lower cost compared to shuttles, delivering the most flexible, scalable, highest-throughput ASRS for demanding warehouse environments.”
Brightpick claimed that its system can deliver up to twice the throughput per unit area compared with shuttle systems, while maximizing labor savings and storage density. Brightpick will unveil it publicly at LogiMAT next week.
The post Building tomorrow: How Bedrock Robotics is changing the construction industry appeared first on The Robot Report.