Standard Bots co-founder and CEO Evan Beard said the company, founded in 2017 by Beard, James Cordle, and David Golden, aims to make industrial robots easier to teach, deploy, and use by removing friction that keeps manufacturers from using more automation. Beard noted that “99 percent of them are not made here in the U.S.” and that the company set out to build an American-made robotics company with products “simple enough to use, you don’t even need a manual.” Beard sees physical AI as a way to change how robots are programmed, where a person can show the robot what to do through a handheld device, controller, or teleoperation, and the robot records the movement to create training data. “What’s changed in the last few years is all the advancements in something like ChatGPT are coming to the physical world,” Beard said. He pointed to clothes folding as an example of a difficult physical task, noting that robots have traditionally struggled with variation, while newer models can help address that issue.