{"id":218660,"date":"2025-07-24T20:10:35","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T01:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/they-helped-make-waymo-go-now-theyre-building-ai-powered-robots-to-solve-americas-labor-crisis"},"modified":"2025-07-24T20:10:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T01:10:35","slug":"they-helped-make-waymo-go-now-theyre-building-ai-powered-robots-to-solve-americas-labor-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/they-helped-make-waymo-go-now-theyre-building-ai-powered-robots-to-solve-americas-labor-crisis","title":{"rendered":"They helped make Waymo go. Now they\u2019re building AI-powered robots to solve America\u2019s labor crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/they-helped-make-waymo-go-now-theyre-building-ai-powered-robots-to-solve-americas-labor-crisis.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman\u2014a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive\u2014cofounded <a href=\"https:\/\/bedrockrobotics.com\/\">Bedrock Robotics<\/a> in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Dj2g9tuJN8A\">fully autonomous<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Dj2g9tuJN8A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world\u2019s most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,\u201d Sofman tells <em>Fast Company<\/em>. \u201cWe can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman\u2014a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive\u2014cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous. Sofman has brought together fellow engineers [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}