Why This MIT Roboticist Is Open-Sourcing His Humanoid | Randall Briggs, Steel Bot

Randall Briggs worked on the original MIT Cheetah, taught advanced machining, and is now building a humanoid robot with root-level access, actuators made in-house, and a 100-year warranty. His bet is that nobody is going to program a robot that does everything, so he opened the hardware and let everyone who buys one do the R&D. Our Managing Partner, Tony Wang, sits down with Randall on open hardware, American manufacturing, and building a robot meant to outlive its owner. Timestamps 0:00 – Episode Intro 0:57 – What Steel Bot is building 1:56 – Why the worse robot won research 4:20 – MIT, centrifuges, and Sangbae Kim's lab 8:00 – Back-drivability, and why raw power is the wrong goal 12:40 – Why wheels are the BlackBerry of robotics 16:38 – Where humanoid safety actually stands 18:54 – Why he left a closed humanoid company 22:05 – The FCC covered list 23:30 – Building his own actuators 26:42 – Why he won't use a contract manufacturer 31:14 – The 100-year warranty 37:15 – Making money without planned obsolescence 41:50 – A billion niches nobody can predict 47:40 – When you can actually buy one 🔗 RANDALL BRIGGS Steelbot: https://steel.bot/ X: https://x.com/randallmbriggs LinkedIn:   / randall-briggs   🎙️ 500 GLOBAL Tony Wang:   / tonywang1   500 Global: https://500.co/ LinkedIn:   / 500global   Instagram:   / 500global   X: https://x.com/500GlobalVC