Scott LaValley, CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, says robot makers should prioritize social acceptance over capabilities

interview Scott LaValley, founder and CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, suspects he may have helped encourage Elon Musk to get into the humanoid robot business.

The pendulum is so pegged toward these robots as tools, and as a way of performing tasks and augmenting human labor in a lower-cost way that may or may not be more efficient – to be determined on how that plays out

"He visited me on a Sunday afternoon with his kids and spent half a day with me at Disney, seeing Baby Groot and asking me questions on 'Should I start my own humanoid team?'" said LaValley in an interview with The Register. "And I say, 'Well, yeah, why aren't you already?'"

LaValley worked at Disney as a principal imagineer between 2016 and 2021, then left to start his own Nevada-based robotics company. Before that, he worked at Boston Dynamics and then at Google following ...