
PITTSBURGH – Robots are on the fast track for a lunar landing, handling industrial tasks working safely side-by-side with humans, picking apples and grapes, and moving a patient from wheelchair to bed and back in a matter of minutes.
The steel city, a cradle of robotics since the late 1970s, has been patiently toiling to the path of physical artificial intelligence (AI), and now is the shining city on a hill. As Silicon Valley frantically pursues its latest gold rush, more than 100 startups here, aided by Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Robotics Institute, University of Pittsburgh and an army of developers are creating the real-life applications for humanoids, autonomous vehicles and drones to hurtle nearly every conceivable industry over the next century.
Pittsburgh is among tech’s 29 robotics clusters in the world. It is No. 3 overall, behind the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.
Big Tech has noticed. Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have set up shop here in recent years, or added to their staffs. Basking in the glow of NVIDIA Corp. anointing it as its first municipal partner, Pittsburgh is readying a new high-tech airport later this year, part dependent on robots. Meanwhile, Astrobotic Technology Inc., one of the highest-profile startups from CMU, is prepping its second autonomous lunar lander, Griffin Mission One, for launch later this year.
Down on earth, autonomous trucks from Aurora Innovation Inc. patrol highways. Manufacturing drones are performing inventory. Airborne drones patrol the skies. Humanoids and robotics are being created, trained and tested throughout the city as futuristic projects sprout like Hazelwood Green, Mill 19 and BioForge.
“Pittsburgh is having its Detroit 1905 moment [with the auto industry],” Mark DeSantis, former CEO of Bloomfield Robotics, acquired last year by Kubota North America Corp. for crop health monitoring, said over lunch in the city’s AI Alley, in the shadow of Google’s local headquarters.
“When CMU started robotics in the late ’70s, everybody laughed,” said DeSantis, who is an adviser to Kubota and an adjunct professor at CMU. “We would constantly hear, ‘How many Googles come out of CMU? To that, I now say, ‘F— you!'”
Pittsburgh is in many ways the ideal template for the AI/robotics revolution: There is the legacy of the Robotics Institute, home to the world’s first PhD program in 1989; several universities in the city; plenty of warehouse space dating to the Big Steel era that is highly conducive to safely test robots (a former Nabisco plant is now home to wheelchair bots); a striving ecosystem of startups; and plenty of support from Big Tech who have established a footprint in western Pennsylvania to gain an edge in the AI race.
But this isn’t an overnight success story. Locals say Pittsburgh’s moment has been decades in the making. “If anything, the market has caught up with AI and what the city has done,” says Brett Phillips, chief business development officer/general counsel of Hellbender.
In a tour of CMU’s robotics labs this week, we came across a variety of bots built and programmed to do industrial work shoulder-to-shoulder with humans (Unitree G1, or “Halo,” a 3.5-foot-high humanoid trained and controlled via Apple Vision Pro); a sophisticated robotic hand, DeltaHand, that can manipulate a syringe or pick grapes; and SonicBoom, a fruit picking device that relies as much on sound as vision to pluck apples from trees. In each case, the students treated their creations with affection and celebrated each of their robots’ achievements like beaming parents.
A few miles away, the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), which is crafting several wheelchairs for the disabled, demonstrated the Power Personal Transfer System. It safely moves a patient from wheelchair to bed with no human assistance in about two minutes. (We tried it in the labs, and can vouch for its effectiveness.) Another project would eliminate the need to leave a wheelchair when boarding or leaving a flight; reconfigured planes would have designated disabled seating spaces.
Across town, in the shadow of Acrisure Stadium where the Pittsburgh Steelers play, Astrobotic symbolizes the Big Ideas happening here, quite literally in shooting for the moon and beyond. Astrobotics’ bid to become the first commercial company to successfully land on the Moon fell short a year ago when the Peregrine Mission One burned up in the atmosphere and broke apart over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. But a second attempt is scheduled for late 2025 via Griffin Mission One lunar lander, which will carry an autonomous Cube Rover from Canada. Like other commercial ventures, Astrobotic has partnered with NASA to deliver cargo to the lunar surface as the space agency works on separate plans to get its astronauts to the moon later this decade.
Astrobotic’s LunaGrid-Lite power and transmission system is designed to “pave the way for power generation and distribution services on the Moon, and change the game for lunar surface systems like landers, rovers, habitats, science suits, and in-situ resource utilization pilot plants,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said in a statement.
Space exploration for science discovery and industrialization of the Moon hasn’t been this essential since man landed in 1969. “It is the refresh of an existing pedigree, and something both [political] sides can agree on,” said Justine Kasznica, board chair of the Keystone Space Collaborative of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Down to Earth, bots are not only on the ground — robo dogs are often spotted walking on the CMU campus — and in the air, but below ground. Underwater robots are in abundance for inspection of municipal water, waste and energy.
“There are the power tools of modern business,” Jennifer Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, said from Tech Forge, a Build Back Better program that is part of Robotics Row in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. The old, hard scrabble neighborhood, once home to steel workers in row houses in the 20th century before falling into irrelevance, is now the hippest part of town.
It’s All About Patience and Perseverance
Pittsburgh’s practical, patient approach to delivering robotic solutions over the next three to 10 years offers a profound bookend to Big Tech. In Silicon Valley, the mindset over the last few years has been toiling over incremental innovation and convenience apps in the pursuit of fatter profits to assuage shareholders each quarter.
“Silicon Valley is great at innovating what is in front of them, and we are focusing on solving problems,” said Jen Gilburg, deputy secretary of technology and entrepreneurship at the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, who worked 30 years in tech in California.
At CES earlier this month, however, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang offered a new dynamic, with talk of physical AI where robots become a fixture in health care, manufacturing, the roads, offices and retail.
Huang’s challenge throws down the gauntlet on moonshots sorely lacking in tech, where hardware is hard, expensive and requires something in short supply in Silicon Valley: Patience.
It Won’t be Easy or Especially Affordable
George Kantor, co-founder of Bloomfield and another CMU instructor, cites other challenges. Beside patience, robotics requires perseverance, plenty of funding and loads of serendipity. “Robotics is not like other AI pursuits,” he said. “It doesn’t scale as quickly with immediate results just by throwing a ton of money at it. Look at the AV industry. The traditional venture capital model does not work for robotics.”
An agriculture company could sink $10 million in developing a prototype for crop collection, for example, and it could prove a money-loser because of opposition from labor, regulatory hurdles, or it isn’t efficient enough, according to Kantor. [Robotics companies have one key advantage from a few years ago, he added. They can buy a basic assembled model — think of it as a starter kit — for $20,000 to $50,000 without building a robot from scratch.]
But Pittsburgh and the general tech economy is willing to take the risks with trillions of dollars in potential revenue from all vestiges of AI, especially robots.
Robots are considered crucial to offset a so-called silver tsunami: Retirement from an aging population is leading to major job shortages in multiple industries. Labor experts warn there could be 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs if current trends continue by 2030.
Automation used to be considered the bogeyman of workers, but this may change largely because of what is happening in — of all places — Pittsburgh.
Tech works in mysterious ways. And things have gone full circle in what used to be the steel city.