ICRA 2025 Plenary - Tessa Lau - So You Want to Build a Robot Company?

In this talk

1. 5:25

   Learn the customer’s problem first

   At Savioke, Lau helped build hotel delivery robots before learning that hotels valued the novelty more than the service problem the robots addressed. For her next company, she spent months talking with founders, investors, and construction workers, then visiting active sites to understand the work firsthand. She recommends identifying a buyer and a pressing need before committing to a product or hardware.

2. 16:20

   Test the market and the business case

   Lau evaluated possible construction tasks by looking at who would pay, how large the market could be, and whether the costs and revenue could support a business. Her team explored a cleanup robot and assessed debris, obstacles, and how waste moved through a site before building hardware. Investors backed the team’s discovery process even though the initial cleanup concept was not the final product.

3. 30:20

   Find a problem worth solving, then build in public

   While observing job sites, Lau noticed workers marking building layouts on concrete by hand. Contractors had tried to automate the task themselves, including one major contractor that spent three years and $3 million without achieving the needed precision. Dusty’s team developed a robot to print floor plans on site and shared early sketches and videos with customers and investors to get feedback.

4. 37:40

   Treat failures as field lessons

   An early test went wrong when high-latency Wi-Fi caused the robot to veer off course and mark a finished floor incorrectly. The team later traced erratic winter behavior to a motor controller that produced faulty signals in cold conditions. Lau uses these incidents to show why robotics teams need repeated real-world testing and careful diagnosis before settling on a fix.

5. 46:22

   Keep customer value at the center

   Lau says customers use Dusty robots to mark layouts for walls and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work, helping teams coordinate trades and check locations against digital plans. At the time of the talk, Dusty had about 60 employees and more than 170 robots in the field, which had marked over 230 million square feet. In the Q&A, she says she would have kept talking with customers throughout the company’s growth instead of stepping back from those conversations.