Teddy Warner, 19, has always been interested in robotics. His family was in the industry and he says he had “grew up” in a machine operator in the high school. Now Warner is building its own robotics company, intempus, the robot makes a little more human.
Intempus builds tech to retrofit existing robots with human emotional expressions in order to better interact with people with these machines and to better predict their movements. If you give these robots human reactions, data is also generated that can be used to better train AI models.
These robots will show expression through kinetic movements, Warner told Techcrunch.
“People derive many of our unconscious signals, not from their face, not from semantics, but only from the movement of their arms and their upper body,” said Warner. “This extends to dogs and cats and other animals that are not people.”
Warner said he had the idea for Intempus when he worked in Midjourney in the AI Research Lab. He said that Midjourney, like many other AI research laboratories, had worked on worldwide AI models or AI models, who understand and make decisions based on the dynamics of the real world and the spatial properties in contrast to cause and effect.
But for these models it will be very difficult to achieve this spatial thinking, Warner recognized, since many of the data to which the models were trained came from robots who did not have this spatial argument.
“Robots are currently going from A to C, i.e. observation of action, while people and all living things have this mediation step that we call a physiological condition,” said Warner. “Robot has no physiological condition. They have no fun, they have no stress. If we want robots to understand the world like a human can and are able to communicate with people in a way that is innate to us, is less uncomfortable, we have to give them this step step.”
Warner took this idea and started researching. He started with FMRI data that measures brain activity by proving changes in blood flow and oxygen, but it didn’t work. Then his friend suggested trying out a polygraph (Lie Detector test) that works by grasping sweat data and he began to find some success.
“I was shocked how quickly I could train from recording sweat data for myself and some of my friends and then this model, with the robot, essentially have an emotional composition that is based exclusively on welding data,” said Warner.
Since then it has been extended from sweat data to other areas such as body temperature, heart rate and photoplethysmography, which, among other things, measures the changes in blood volume in the microvascular level of the skin.
Warner started Inempus in September 2024 and spent the first four months exclusively for research. He has spent the last couple building these emotional skills for robots and potential customers. He has already signed seven enterprise robotics partners.
Intempus is also part of the current cohort of Peter Thiel -Hiel -scholar program that offers young entrepreneurs 200,000 US dollars over two years for the demolition of the school and the establishment of their companies.
Warner said the next step for Intempus was to hire – he has made it as a team of one so far – and received part of the technology that was already built in front of humans to test. While Intempus is currently working on retrofitting existing robots and concentrating on it, Warner said that in the future he would never rule out his own emotionally intelligent robots.
“I have a few robots and they have a number of emotions, and I want someone to come in and only understand that this robot is a joyful robot, and if I can convey some emotions by nature, some intentions that the robot has, I did my job right,” said Warner. “I think I can, you know, really prove that I did this in the next four to six months.”