Realizing the Potential of Robotics

Jiajun Zhu and I were fortunate to be early members of the Google self-driving car project. This was an endeavor that consumed us for seven years and five years, respectively. That project accelerated — by several years — a future where up to a million lives will be saved annually. Google’s impact on the world through self-driving cars wasn’t just moving the needle, it was swinging it. Today, Google (now Waymo) is well on its way to becoming a major player in the future of transportation. But whether it succeeds in that goal or not, it has already given the world an enormous gift.

We started Nuro over a year and a half ago to try and swing the needle again, this time with robotics. The next twenty years are going to be transformative for robotics and society. Recent and ongoing advances in machine learning, sensing, and computing technologies are already enabling massive changes across multiple industries. Here in our own backyard in California, we’ve met teams using advances in machine learning and robotics to design sustainable food supply chains, detect cancer, and improve security, manufacturing, logistics, communication, and entertainment — to name a few. Some of these applications will be logical extensions of current technologies and industries, and others will be wildly innovative and almost unimaginable to us now.

These days words like “impact” and “disruption” are thrown around loosely and without accountability. But we think this transformation really will be disruptive, presenting the biggest challenge to governments and society since the Industrial Revolution. However, it also represents massive potential for good and for the democratization of technology. This transformation could promote more efficient use of our resources, our time, and our attention. For all of us. This is what Nuro hopes to facilitate.

Our mission as a company is to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. We will measure our success by how many people’s lives are substantially improved by our products. We’re not building fancy gadgets for those who already have everything. We’re developing technology to improve the quality of life for everyone.

To get there, we’re focused on robotics applications that we can launch in a few years, are technically challenging, and will have a large positive impact on the world. And we’re doing it by assembling a team that is eager to tackle the hardest, most compelling problems. Our existing team has collectively played a role on several of the most powerful and successful applications of robotics to date.

Here, on our blog, we’ll post updates about what we’re up to along this journey. In our next post, we’ll dig into our first application and why we’re so excited about it. Stay tuned!