Aaron Saunders (left) keynoting the 2025 Robotics Summit & Expo and Melonee Clever.
Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics, two distinguished humanoid robotics builders, are experiencing management adjustments. Aaron Saunders, chief know-how officer at Boston Dynamics, introduced on LinkedIn that he’s stepping down from that function. And Melonee Clever, chief product officer at Agility Robotics, is leaving the corporate on the finish of the month, in accordance with The Info. Clever’s departure from Agility Robotics was additionally confirmed by The Robotic Report.
Saunders spent over 20 years at Boston Dynamics. He was an early developer of BigDog, the predecessor of the corporate’s now commercialized Spot quadruped. As CTO, he led multidisciplinary groups to set the corporate’s technological imaginative and prescient and align analysis and growth with enterprise wants.
“Now, the dynamic capabilities we pioneered have helped forge an thrilling new trade aimed toward bringing AI to the bodily world,” Saunders stated when saying his departure. “The very conversations and critiques at the moment—YouTube movies and backflips—are a testomony to how we shifted the boundary of the attainable.”
Earlier this yr, Saunders keynoted the Robotics Summit & Expoa robotics growth occasion in Boston produced by The Robotic Report. He gave attendees an inside take a look at how the corporate redesigned the Atlas humanoid from the bottom up. Saunders holds a grasp’s in mechanical engineering from the College of Victoria and a bachelor’s from the College of Alberta.
Clever steps away from Agility
Clever joined Agility Robotics in 2023 as CTO and shifted into the chief product officer function in Could 2024. She led Agility’s engineering crew along with the newly fashioned product group.
Agility instructed staff that Marroquin Marco will change into chief {hardware} officer, reported The Info. As well as, the corporate plans to maneuver its utility software program and product divisions beneath the know-how division, reporting to CTO Pras Velagapudi.
Clever has years of expertise within the robotics trade. Previous to becoming a member of Agility in 2023, she was the vp of robotics automation at Zebra Applied sciences. Earlier than that, Clever was CEO of Fetch Robotics till its acquisition by Zebra in 2021 for $290 million.
Clever a acknowledged robotics innovator
Beforehand, Clever was the second worker at Willow Storage, the place she led a crew of engineers creating next-generation robotic {hardware} and software program, together with the open-source Robotic Working System (ROS), the PR2, and TurtleBot. Clever serves as a robotics board member for the Affiliation for Advancing Automation (A3).
All through her profession, Clever has obtained many accolades and awards, together with the MIT Expertise Assessment TR35, Provide & Demand Chain Govt’s 2021 Provide Chain Lady of the 12 months, the 2022 Engelberger Award, and as certainly one of “eight CEOs altering the way in which we work” by Enterprise Insider.
Clever obtained a B.S. in mechanical engineering and physics engineering and an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the College of Illinois.
Agility Robotics might be keynoting RoboBusinesswhich takes place on Oct. 15 and 16 in Santa Clara, Calif. The corporate will participate within the panel “Classes Realized from First Humanoid Deployments.” Different members of the panel embrace Jim Fan, director of AI and a distinguished scientist at NVIDIA, and Katlyn Lewicke, head of worldwide automation technique and intel at GXO Logistics.
