Aaron Saunders (left) keynoting the 2025 Robotics Summit & Expo and Melonee Smart.
Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics, two distinguished humanoid robotics builders, are experiencing management modifications. Aaron Saunders, chief know-how officer at Boston Dynamics, introduced on LinkedIn that he’s stepping down from that function. And Melonee Smart, chief product officer at Agility Robotics, is leaving the corporate on the finish of the month, based on The Info. Smart’s departure from Agility Robotics was additionally confirmed by The Robotic Report.
Saunders spent over twenty years at Boston Dynamics. He was an early developer of BigDog, the predecessor of the corporate’s now commercialized Spot quadruped. As CTO, he led multidisciplinary groups to set the corporate’s technological imaginative and prescient and align analysis and improvement with enterprise wants.
“Now, the dynamic capabilities we pioneered have helped forge an thrilling new trade aimed toward bringing AI to the bodily world,” Saunders mentioned when saying his departure. “The very conversations and critiques at this time—YouTube movies and backflips—are a testomony to how we shifted the boundary of the potential.”
Earlier this yr, Saunders keynoted the Robotics Summit & Expo, a robotics improvement occasion in Boston produced by The Robotic Report. He gave attendees an inside have a look at how the corporate redesigned the Atlas humanoid from the bottom up. Saunders holds a grasp’s in mechanical engineering from the College of Victoria and a bachelor’s from the College of Alberta.
Smart steps away from Agility
Smart joined Agility Robotics in 2023 as CTO and shifted into the chief product officer function in Might 2024. She led Agility’s engineering crew along with the newly shaped product group.
Agility advised staff that Marco Marroquin will turn into chief {hardware} officer, reported The Info. As well as, the corporate plans to maneuver its utility software program and product divisions beneath the know-how division, reporting to CTO Pras Velagapudi.
Smart has years of expertise within the robotics trade. Previous to becoming a member of Agility in 2023, she was the vp of robotics automation at Zebra Applied sciences. Earlier than that, Smart was CEO of Fetch Robotics till its acquisition by Zebra in 2021 for $290 million.
Smart a acknowledged robotics innovator
Beforehand, Smart was the second worker at Willow Storage, the place she led a crew of engineers growing next-generation robotic {hardware} and software program, together with the open-source Robotic Working System (ROS), the PR2, and TurtleBot. Smart serves as a robotics board member for the Affiliation for Advancing Automation (A3).
All through her profession, Smart has obtained many accolades and awards, together with the MIT Know-how Evaluation TR35, Provide & Demand Chain Government’s 2021 Provide Chain Girl of the 12 months, the 2022 Engelberger Award, and as one in every of “eight CEOs altering the best way we work” by Enterprise Insider.
Smart obtained a B.S. in mechanical engineering and physics engineering and an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the College of Illinois.
Agility Robotics might be keynoting RoboBusiness, which takes place on Oct. 15 and 16 in Santa Clara, Calif. The corporate will participate within the panel “Classes Discovered from First Humanoid Deployments.” Different members of the panel embody Jim Fan, director of AI and a distinguished scientist at NVIDIA, and Katlyn Lewicke, head of worldwide automation technique and intel at GXO Logistics.
