marc raibert

• The Future of Robotics and Physical AI
  Where robotics is heading as it merges with artificial intelligence, from the person who made dynamic legged robots real. Raibert offers the perspective of an engineer now painting the vision for what robots could become.
• Building Robots That Think for Themselves
  The shift from machines that perform pre-programmed routines to robots that solve problems in the unstructured real world. Raibert draws on the RAI Institute's pursuit of the long-term science of intelligent machines.
• From Lab to the Real World: Commercializing Advanced Robotics
  How breakthrough robotics moves from research to commercial reality, from the founder who spun Boston Dynamics out of MIT. Raibert shows what it takes to turn scientific advances into products like Spot and Stretch.
• The Convergence of AI and Robotics
  Why the field stands at the threshold of a new era, as intelligence and physical capability come together. Raibert maps what that convergence makes possible — and what still stands in the way.

speaker Bio: 

Marc Raibert is the founder of Boston Dynamics — arguably the most influential pure-play robotics organization in the world — and the executive director of The RAI Institute. Over three decades leading Boston Dynamics, which he founded in 1992 as a spin-off from MIT, his teams produced the robots that defined the public image of the field: BigDog, the Atlas biped, and the commercially available Spot and Stretch. He was the first to build robots that balance as they walk and run, and that early focus on dynamic stability laid the scientific foundation for today's mobile robots.

Before Boston Dynamics, Raibert was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and at Carnegie Mellon, where he founded the Leg Laboratory. He earned his PhD at MIT in 1977 and began his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, he was named to Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award. In 2022 he founded The AI Institute (now the RAI Institute) to pursue the long-term science of intelligent machines.

Summary (Core Conviction):

For most of his career, Raibert took pride in showing what his teams had actually built, not in talking about the future — at Boston Dynamics, as he puts it, they simply "did the next thing." With the RAI Institute, that has shifted: he is now painting the vision for what robots could someday become. His conviction is that the field stands at the threshold of a new era — intelligent robots that can think for themselves and solve problems in the unstructured, real world, rather than performing pre-programmed routines in the lab. For audiences, he offers the perspective of the engineer who made legged robots real, now describing the convergence of AI and robotics that will define the decade ahead.

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