On 13 November 2026, MIT News published a profile of Robust AI, a startup co-founded in 2019 by Anthony Jules and MIT Professor Emeritus Rodney Brooks, and of Carter, its wheeled mobile robot designed to work alongside people in warehouses and factories rather than replace them. The story is a useful case study in how an academic robotics lineage turns into a product built around human-robot interaction research.
What MIT News reported
The article, written by Zach Winn and dated 13 November 2026, describes Carter as a robot shaped like a wheeled utility cart. According to MIT News, it has a force-sensitive handlebar, an AI-powered vision system and holonomic wheels that let it move in any direction. A person can steer it with one hand, or direct it by gesture or through an onboard touch screen. MIT News says Carter is currently deployed in logistics warehouses and on factory floors for picking, stocking and autonomous item transport.
The people named in the profile are Anthony Jules, co-founder and chief innovation officer; Rodney Brooks, co-founder and chief technology officer, who was on the MIT faculty from 1984 to 2010, directed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) from 1997 to 2007 and co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics; and Leila Takayama, vice president of human-robot interaction.
The design choices behind Carter
System performance over robot autonomy
Jules is quoted in the article as saying that in these environments “what really determines success is how the overall system performs”. MIT News frames the company’s position as treating the robot, the human worker and the back-end software as one system, with people kept in control so they can keep the operation moving. The robot is meant to be added gradually: example workflows include guiding workers to items and following workers to loading points while carrying items across large sites, and customers decide how Carter fits their workspace.
Leaving the physical judgement to people
Brooks says in the article that the approach lets “humans do what humans are good at in the physical world”. The company, per MIT News, tries to understand a worker’s core tasks and then build features that speed those tasks up, whether a person or a robot performs them.
Evidence from human-robot interaction research
Takayama pointed MIT News to a peer-reviewed study of hospital robots. As the article relays it, many of those robots were found switched off, and nurses reported that they broke. Brooks’s explanation, quoted by MIT News, was that the robots were getting in the way of nurses’ primary tasks, for example by stopping in hallways and blocking staff moving patients. The article does not give the study’s title or authors, so the finding is best read as the company’s own account of the literature that shaped its design.
How the product has developed
Robust AI has described Carter publicly since 2022. In a company announcement dated 21 June 2022, it introduced Carter as a hardware product concept and collaborative mobile robot for material handling, alongside Grace, a no-code software suite that coordinates work between people and robots. The same announcement named Takayama as vice president of HRI and design and said the company was founded in 2019. The 2026 MIT News profile adds the company’s account of its path: it initially pursued disinfection robots during the Covid-19 pandemic, pivoted after surface transmission was ruled out, and chose logistics and manufacturing after years of customer interviews.
What it means for researchers and research offices
- Human-robot interaction as a design input. The profile illustrates a pattern in which published interaction studies, such as the hospital-robot work Takayama cites, inform product requirements. Researchers in the field can read it as evidence of the kind of findings that industry says it uses. See our guide to human factors engineering for the discipline behind this design approach.
- Faculty-founded companies. The company links an MIT professor emeritus and a former CSAIL director to a commercial robotics product. Technology transfer offices and research administrators handling similar ventures can compare the structures described in university spinout companies explained.
- Related robotics research on this site. MIT and NYU researchers introduced a separate framework for helping robots interpret nonliteral commands, covered in our news post on the MIT Flex framework. For background on the field, see what is robotics.
What the coverage does not say
The MIT News article is a company profile based on interviews with its leadership. It reports no funding amounts, deployment counts, customer names or performance measurements, and it does not cite the hospital-robot study by title. Claims about Carter’s effect on productivity are therefore the company’s own framing, not independently measured results.
Sources
- MIT News, “Helping robots fit into the human workplace”, Zach Winn, 13 November 2026: https://news.mit.edu/2026/helping-robots-fit-into-human-workplace-1113 (checked 2026-11-15)
- Robust.AI, “Robust.AI unveils software suite Grace and hardware product Carter”, 21 June 2022: https://robust.ai/robustai-unveils-software-suite-grace-hardware-product-carter (checked 2026-11-15)
