Unmanned aerial drones and vehicles are already on the frontlines of military conflicts. Foundation Future Industries wants combat-ready humanoid robots to be next.
Governments are increasingly exploring the integration of artificial intelligence into defense, and the U.S. has flagged unmanned military systems as a top priority. Still, experts say humanoid robots are still many years away from large-scale use in wars as the technology and regulations around them need to evolve further. He added that there have been pilots programs in Ukraine, where robots move objects around. A second-generation robot equipped with chips from Advanced Micro Devices is in development. Initially, Foundation trains the robots to do outdoor jobs that are too dangerous for humans. It uses data gathered in industrial settings like warehouses and shipyards to then train the robots for warzones. But that’s far from being a truly autonomous robot that can operate for long periods of time in unfamiliar environments with little human intervention. A recent Stanford University report underlined the practical and ethical challenges around deploying robots in battlefields. Then there is the risk of relying on a robotics supply chain currently dominated by China. The U.S. is making efforts to counter that. Foundation, which sources some parts from China, is making adjustments to comply. Pathak doesn’t think a ban is the best route for closing the supply-chain gap, saying: “I don’t think it’s going to yield the results that the government intends it to. Without that, the U.S. will run into “similar pitfalls [as it did with] electric vehicles and drones. Write to Sherry Qin at [email protected]
Foundation has secured a $24 million contract with the Pentagon and is in the process of testing a battle robot with U.S. defense forces. Founded in 2024, Foundation has so far deployed around 10 humanoid robots, Pathak said. Its flagship robot is the Phantom MK-1, a man-sized humanoid which can carry 40 kilograms. The company’s San Francisco facility can currently produce between 300-500 robots a year, and it is building another site to boost capacity. Asked about Foundation’s progress toward its previously stated goal of building 10,000 robots by end-2026, Pathak said a lot of those earlier aims were “pretty ambitious. Under the new rules, domestic components need to make up over 65% of a robot’s total cost to avoid being labeled foreign-made through 2028. In 2029, that will increase to 75%.
When a robot’s perception, reasoning and adaptive behavior get precise enough, “instead of dropping a bomb in a building, you can send humanoids to actually walk inside that building and go directly to the target,” said Sankaet Pathak, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Foundation. “We’ve done deployments with the Air Force,” he said. “We’ve done deployments in auto manufacturing where they’ve done racking and unracking tasks,” he said. “We lease them today for $100,000 per robot per year,” he said. “Defense is a lynchpin application for heavy industrial work,” Pathak said. “We’re gearing up to start building a lot more of them,” he said, adding that Phantom is close to being able to learn a task after just a few human demonstrations. Achieving that would require the physical AI foundation model to “understand the physics, kinematics, dynamics of the world really well,” Pathak said. Questions remain around highly autonomous systems’ reliability, accountability, cost and cybersecurity, it said, and their effectiveness in real-world operations is still being evaluated. In July, it banned most imports of new humanoid robot models, part of a bid to build “an independent and resilient robotics supply chain and industrial base” critical to “dominating on the battlefield. What’s urgently needed is increased investment in the local supply chain, he said.
