Founder Mode From Hollywood to High-Rises: Making Robots with Asa Hammond
EPISODE 12
From building gravity-defying camera rigs for Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to sending drones into live nuclear reactors and, most recently, designing job-site robots that can survive the dust and chaos of construction, Asa Hammond’s career shows how precision engineering and artistic vision can coexist. In this conversation, Asa explains how the exacting pixel-perfect discipline of Hollywood VFX became the blueprint for ultra-reliable industrial robotics, why safety and repeatability always come before flashy features, and how new UX layers—voice, LLMs, demonstration learning—are finally making complex machines feel like familiar tools. Along the way, we hear tales of full-scale “stunt-double” reactors, the reality of folding-laundry robots, and what it takes to assemble a world-class, T-shaped engineering team that thrives at the edge of possibility.
CHAPTERS
00:29 – From Film Sets to Founders: Show Intro
02:12 – Asa’s Hollywood-to-Hard-Hats Origin Story
05:57 – Engineering Robots for Gravity
09:05 – Reinventing Construction with Industrial Arms
15:56 – Flying Drones Inside Nuclear Reactors
LINKS
Connect with Asa Hammond
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