Teddy Warner, 19, is always interested in robotics. His family was in the industry and says he was “growing up” working in a mechanical store while in high school. Now Warner is making his own robotics company, Intempus, which seems to make the robots a little more human.
Indempus It is the technology building to upgrade existing robots with human emotional expressions to help people interact better with these machines and to better predict their movements. Providing these human reactions will also produce data that can be used for better AI models.
These robots will show expression through motor movements, Warner told TechCrunch.
“People draw many subconscious signals, not from the face, not from semantics, but only from the movement of your weapons and torso,” Warner said. “This extends to dogs and cats and other animals that are not humans.”
Warner said he got the idea for Intempus while working at Ai Research Lab Midjourney. He said that Midjourney, like many other AI research laboratories, worked on AI World AI models or AI models who understand and make decisions based on the dynamics of the real world and the spatial properties, as opposed to the simple cause and the result.
But it will be really difficult for these models to achieve this spatial reasoning, Warner realized, because many of the data trained by models came from robots who did not have this spatial reasoning.
“Robots are going from A to C today, that is, observation in action, while people and all living things have this intermediate step B we call a normal state,” Warner said. “Robots do not have a normal situation. They do not have fun. They have no stress. If we want the robots to understand the world as a human container and be able to communicate with people in a way that is inherent to us. This is less amazing, more predictable, we must give them this step.”
Warner took this idea and began to research. It started with FMRI data, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen, but did not work. Then his friend suggested that he try a polygamy (lie detector test), which works by recording sweat data and began to find some success.
“I was overwhelmed by how fast I could go by arresting sweat data for myself and some of my friends and then train this model who can actually allow robots to have an emotional composition based solely on sweat data,” Warner said.
Since then it has been expanded from sweat data to other areas, such as body temperature, heart rate and photopleism, which measures changes in blood volume at the microvascular level of the skin, among others.
Warner started the Intempus in September 2024 and spent the first four months exclusively in the research. It has passed the latter in a mix of construction of these emotional potential for robots and involving potential customers. He has already signed seven Enterprise robotics partners.
Intempus is also part of Peter Thiel’s current team Thiel scholarship programgiving young entrepreneurs $ 200,000 for two years to leave school and build their companies.
Warner said that the next step for Intempus is to hire – he has done everything so far as a team of one – and take part of the technology that has already been built in front of people to start testing. While Intempus is currently working on the modernization of existing robots and plans to focus on it, Warner said he would never exclude Intempus to build his own emotional clever robots in the future.
“I have a bunch of robots and running a bunch of emotions and I want to come and understand that this robot is a happy robot and if I can inherently convey some emotion, some of the intentions that hold the robot, then I have done my job properly,” he said. “I think I can. You know. They really prove that I’ve done it over the next four to six months.”
