Robots in the Wild — Socially Situated Intelligence for Robots in Public Spaces

02 · What we do

Operations is the product.

We are not building another pilot, another demo, another controlled-environment showcase. We are building the runtime that turns a robot platform into a fleet that operates — reliably, at scale, because it understands social context.

What we deliver

A perception runtime that generalizes across platforms, embodiments, and locations.

One system. Any robot. Any model behind it. Our runtime is designed to sit above π0, GR00T, Gemini Robotics, OpenVLA, or your in-house policy. Drop it in. Ship.

What we charge for

Per-robot, per-month. Aligned to your fleet, not your headcount.

You pay for the robots in service. We get paid when your fleet is operational. The incentives line up by design.

03 · Team

A decade of human-robot interaction in the wild.

Our team has studied human-robot interaction across the full spectrum of robotics — from autonomous vehicles at every level of autonomy, to robot trash cans on New York City streets, to commercial delivery operations at fleet scale. Public spaces. Real interaction. Real failure modes. This is the experience we are bringing to the problem.

Founder

Wendy Ju

CTO · Co-Founder

Professor at Cornell Tech; previously Executive Director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford CDR. PhD Stanford, MS MIT Media Lab. 10,000+ Google Scholar citations.
Wrote The Design of Implicit Interactions (2015) — the foundational text on how machines and people negotiate shared space without explicit instruction. We are productizing that work now.
Creator of the Robotability Score (CHI 2025) ranking how welcoming each NYC street is to delivery robots, and the BAD Dataset (with Accenture Labs) for detecting bystander reactions to robot failure in the wild.
More on LinkedIn →

Founder

Nikhil Gowda

CEO · Co-Founder

Spent nearly five years as a Senior UX Researcher at Amazon Last Mile — daily field exposure to the largest delivery operation in the world, watching where UX actually breaks.
Decade in human-machine interaction research and field operations across delivery, automotive, and aerospace.
Holds 8 US patents; co-author and reviewer at Automotive UI, CHI, and HRI, with two papers in Nature Scientific Reports from human factors work at NASA Ames and the Center for Design Research at Stanford.
Co-author of RRADS (AutoUI 2015) and Nudge: Haptic Pre-Cueing for Automotive Intent with Wendy — ten years of collaboration on how machines communicate intent to humans in motion. It's what that decade of work was always pointing at.
More on LinkedIn →

Where our work has appeared

Cornell Tech Stanford CDR MIT Media Lab Toyota Research Institute NASA Ames CHI · HRI · THRI CNN · NPR · USA Today

Robots in the Wild is an infrastructure company. We make robotic fleets actually work — not in a demo, but on the metrics that decide whether the fleet stays funded.

The fleets we work with are trying to fill a labor gap and finding that they can't, because the operational inefficiencies between tasks compound faster than the unit economics improve. Robots are trained to perform tasks. The challenges are between them.

We are roboticists and social scientists working on the gap that doesn't show up in benchmarks — the one that has kept robots out of public space for forty years.

Come join us in building the most advanced socially situated intelligence in the world.

04 · Contact us

Tell us what you're operating.

We work with a small number of partners before broader release. Tell us about your fleet, your platform, and the failure modes that hurt — we'll get back within a few business days.