Imagine a robot that doesn’t just follow commands but seems to understand you, reacting in a way that feels natural. That’s the future 19-year-old Teddy Warner is building with his company, Intempus. They’re developing groundbreaking technology to give existing robots something revolutionary: human-like emotional expressions. This isn’t just for show; it’s about making robots more predictable, easier for us to interact with intuitively, and providing crucial data for training the next generation of AI.
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Why Do Robots Need ‘Feelings’?
Robots today are amazing at tasks, but they often feel… cold or even unpredictable in their movements. They go from seeing something to doing something (A to C). But humans, and even animals, have an internal step in between – let’s call it a “physiological state” or an internal feeling (the B step). We feel stress, excitement, curiosity, and these feelings subtly influence our actions and are communicated through body language (like how we move our arms or torso). This “B step” makes us understandable and predictable to each other subconsciously.
Robots miss this. They don’t have fun or feel stressed. Intempus believes that for robots to truly work alongside us, understand our world like we do, and allow us to predict their actions naturally without feeling “uncanny,” they need this missing piece. It’s also vital for training advanced AI models – sometimes called world AI models, which need to grasp the dynamics and spatial properties of the real world, not just simple cause and effect.
How Does This Tech Work?
Intempus isn’t putting smiley faces on machines. Their approach focuses on kinetic movements – how a robot’s body moves. Think about it: we get a lot of cues from how someone shifts their weight, gestures, or holds themselves, often more than from their facial expression. Intempus is translating simulated internal states into these physical expressions.
The idea sparked for founder Teddy Warner while working at AI research lab Midjourney. He saw that training AI to understand the real world was tough because the data often came from robots that didn’t “feel” or understand the world themselves. He realized robots needed an internal state like humans have.
His journey to figure out how to measure this involved trying different approaches, from complex brain scans (fMRI) to lie detectors (polygraphs), which track things like sweat data. Sweat data, surprisingly, showed promising results for creating models that could give robots an “emotional composition” based solely on these simple physiological signals.
Teddy Warner, founder of Intempus, pioneers technology to give robots human-like emotional expressions.
Bringing Robots to Life: The Tech Behind It
Building on the early success with sweat data, Intempus has expanded its sensor suite. They now look at data points like body temperature, heart rate, and even subtle changes in blood flow under the skin (using something called photoplethysmography – basically, a way to measure blood volume changes at a micro level). By combining these different physiological signals, they create a richer picture of an internal state, which is then used to drive the robot’s movements and expressions in a way humans can instinctively understand.
From Idea to Reality: The Company’s Journey
Intempus officially launched in September 2024. The first few months were dedicated to deep research into how to capture and translate these complex signals. More recently, the focus has shifted to building the actual technology that can retrofit existing robots and reaching out to potential customers. The approach seems to be resonating; Intempus has already secured partnerships with seven enterprise robotics companies.
Adding to their momentum, the company is also part of Peter Thiel’s prestigious Thiel Fellowship program, which supports young entrepreneurs skipping traditional college to build their ventures by providing funding and mentorship.
What’s Next? The Future of Emotional Robots
Up until now, Teddy Warner has been the sole force behind Intempus. The immediate next step is growth: hiring the first employees to help build out the vision. They also plan to put their emotionally expressive robots in front of people to gather feedback and see if the kinetic “emotions” are intuitively understood by humans.
While the current focus is on adding this emotional layer to existing robots, Warner doesn’t rule out the possibility of Intempus building its own emotionally intelligent robots down the line. The ultimate goal? To create robots whose internal state – their ‘intentions’ or simulated ‘feelings’ – can be easily grasped by humans just by observing their movement. Warner is aiming to prove this concept convincingly in the coming months.
Intempus is pushing the boundaries of human-robot interaction by giving machines a crucial missing piece: understandable internal states. By translating physiological data into expressive movement, they aim to make robots not just functional, but truly intuitive partners. This young company’s work could pave the way for a future where interacting with robots feels less like dealing with a cold machine and more like collaborating with something that genuinely understands its place in the world around you.
