A Day in the Life of a Roboticist: Charlie Kemp

Charlie Kemp’s robotics work starts with a simple goal: make mobile robots with arms useful in homes and workplaces. As cofounder and chief technology officer of Hello Robot, he focuses on assistive machines for older adults and people with disabilities, and he says the real value often shows up in ordinary moments rather than headline-grabbing feats.

That focus comes from years of seeing how people actually use robots. Kemp says some of the best lessons come from watching users, not from sitting alone with code. A dropped object, an itch that needs scratching, a person wanting more control instead of full autonomy — those details shape whether a robot helps or gets in the way. Real-world use, he says, keeps revealing things roboticists did not expect.

His route into the field ran through MIT and the grand challenges of AI. He became interested in AI as an undergraduate, then joined Rod Brooks’s lab and worked on the humanoid robot Domo with cofounder Aaron Edsinger. The pair won a best paper award at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics in 2006 for work on a system that let Domo help place objects on a shelf. That line of work pushed Kemp toward assistive robotics and, later, a faculty position at Georgia Tech.

Hello Robot grew out of that same thread. Kemp and Edsinger founded the company to build non-humanoid robots, and Kemp says the Stretch platform has become a research and development tool for a community finding new ways human-friendly robots can help society. He also points to collaboration with people outside core robotics, including clinical research lead Vy Nguyễn, whose background in occupational therapy has contributed to the company’s work.

One project stands out for him: Robots for Humanity, a collaboration that began after Henry Evans saw a demonstration of his lab’s research on CNN in 2010. Evans has severe quadriplegia, and with Jane Evans and others, Kemp’s team worked on mobile manipulators that could help in daily life. That work fed into the prototype that led to Hello Robot, and Kemp says each generation of Stretch has been shaped by that effort, especially Stretch 4. The part that surprised him most, though, was emotional: a robot handing Jane Evans a rose.