My Thoughts on Actuate 2025
Robotics developer talk and cutting-edge AI
Many people in the robotics space still have not heard about Actuate. It’s not a research conference, nor is it a business conference like RoboBusiness. It’s very much a robotics developer conference, highlighting the new and growing areas at the frontier of robotics research, development, and commercialization.
I was actually invited back this time to host a panel (more on that later) but I wanted to share my thoughts because, once again, I think this is probably the highest value robotics conference in the world right now for people who actually want to build robots — just because it has a great juxtaposition of hardcore engineers, businessmen, and researchers.
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Last year I wrote a blog post on this weird new conference by robotics data visualization conference Foxglove, which you can check out here:
My Thoughts on Actuate 2024
It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the bay area — over a year! — and during that time, so much has changed in the robotics and AI space. Nowhere was that change more obvious than at the Actuate conference by Foxglove.
TL;DR: it was a great conference that I really enjoyed, and it’s probably the premier robotics developer conference around right now. It’s the conference I would recommend if you’re trying to actually build something with robotics. And this year was not any different.
And not all the talk was just AI and deep learning. Vivek Bagaria from Matic gave an interesting (and compelling) talk about how we should all switch over to using Rust for everything, for example, and how it’s let Matic Robotics move much faster when delivering their intelligent home vacuum. Daniel Fullmer of Anduril gave a talk on using Nix for scripting deployable builds — something of interest for anyone trying to ship robots. There was a fireside chat about whether or not you should use ROS, another topic I think is always on the minds of roboticists.
I liked the mix of nitty-gritty, down-in-the-weeds robotics talk like this — how to actually build and deploy your robot software — with the much more forward-looking and trendy talk from people like Liyiming Ke and Sergey Levine of Physical Intelligence, from Deepak Pathak of Skild, and Jason Ma of Dyna Robotics (who gave a clothes-folding demo that we’ve discussed before in this blog).
Some More Quick Thoughts
A bigger diversity of application areas than delivery drones, logistics, construction
Very few humanoids; focusing on robots that “do stuff” like cook, sort, deploy, and so on
Self-driving vehicles are back, with Bedrock and Wayve
I loved seeing the Innate robot in-person
The Symbotic talk blew me away with the scale of their operations, and led me in part to writing this blog post
Wayve is really impressive and gunning for Tesla Autopilot
Final Thoughts
I’m glad to see a “real” robotics developer conference like this gaining steam, and hope to go back next year.
And one last thing: I actually hosted a panel debate on scale vs. structure, and the role of end-to-end training in robotics. I’ll do a follow-up blog post on this later this week!
References
Check out the agenda here to get a feel for what the conference was like.