Marita Cheng

Marita Cheng has spent her career building robots - and has seen firsthand how difficult it is to move from impressive demos to real-world deployment. For decades, robotics struggled with reliability, cost, and scale, leaving most systems stuck in controlled environments. In this talk, she shares a behind-the-scenes perspective on why robotics lagged for so long, what has fundamentally changed with the rise of modern AI, and what it actually takes to deploy robots in the real world. Drawing on her experience across engineering, product, and commercialization, Marita offers a practical, no-hype view of how AI is finally enabling robotics to transition from lab experiments to systems that create real economic impact.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the gap between a working prototype and a scalable product is the hardest problem in robotics
• What recent advances in AI have changed — and why this moment is different from past hype cycles
• The real path forward: how the industry moves from one working robot to millions deployed globally