The Future of Home Robotics: Axel Peytavin on Building Robots That Feel Alive

What if your home robot didn’t just clean, but felt alive — learning, adapting, and becoming part of your family?

In this episode of AI Tinkerers One-Shot, Joe talks with Axel Peytavin, Co-founder & CEO of Innate, about his mission to create robots that aren’t just functional, but truly responsive companions. From his early start coding at age 11 to building one of the first GPT-4 Vision-powered robots, Axel shares how his team is creating an open-source robotics kit and one of the first agentic frameworks for robots — giving developers the tools to teach, customize, and build the next generation of embodied AI.

What you’ll learn:

- Why Axel believes “robots that feel alive” are the future — beyond flashy demos of backflips and kung fu.

- How Innate is making robotics accessible with an open-source hardware and SDK platform.

- The breakthroughs (and roadblocks) in fine motor manipulation, autonomy, and real-time learning.

- How teleoperation, deep learning, and reinforcement learning are shaping the next era of household robots.

- Axel’s vision for robots as companions: cleaning, tidying, assisting — and even calling for help in emergencies.

Whether you’re a tinkerer, developer, or just curious about how soon robots will fold your laundry, this deep dive shows what’s possible now — and what’s coming next.

💡 Resources:

- Innate Robotics – https://innate.bot/

- Axel Peytavin’s Twitter – https://x.com/ax_pey/

- AI Tinkerers – https://aitinkerers.org

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of AI and robotics!

0:00 Axel’s mission — building robots that feel alive

00:57 The open-source kit that lets any tinkerer train new behaviors

05:00 Why applied mathematics is the foundation for AI + robotics

08:17 Early projects: Minecraft plugins with 200K+ downloads

11:04 Innate’s vision for teachable household robots

12:01 Why fine-motor manipulation is the real breakthrough, not backflips

15:19 How deep learning is driving rapid robotics progress

17:11 Teleoperation as the engine for data collection and training

23:21 Why tidying up, laundry, and dishes are the killer apps for home robots

32:24 Live teleoperation demo of Maurice in action

36:08 Breaking down the system architecture — Wi-Fi, WebSockets, Python SDK

41:40 Maurice shows delicate fine-motor skills with object pickup

43:53 How Innate built one of the first agentic frameworks for robots

49:50 The rise of an open-source robotics community around Maurice

57:03 Viral GPT-4 Vision robot demo — and what it revealed about the future