Teddy Warner, 19, has always been interested in robotics. His family is in the industry and he says he worked in a mechanic store in high school. Now, Warner is building its own Intempus robotics company that is trying to make the robots a little more human.
Intempus is building technology to modify existing robots with human-like emotional expressions so that humans can improve interaction with these machines and better predict their movements. Giving these robots a human-like response also generates data that can be used to better train AI models.
These robots show expression through motion movement, Warner told TechCrunch.
“Humans derive a lot of subconscious signals only from the movement of their arms and torso, not from their faces, but from semantics,” Warner said. “This ranges from non-human dogs, cats and other animals.”
Warner said he got the idea for Intempus while working at AI Research Lab Midjourney. He said, like many other AI labs, Midjourney is working on AI models in the world, or AI models that understand and determine the dynamics of the real world and spatial characteristics.
However, Warner realized that these models would be really difficult to achieve this spatial reasoning.
“Currently, robots move from A to C. That is, action-taking observations, but humans and all living things have this intermediate B step called physiological states,” Warner said. “Robots don’t have physiological states. They don’t enjoy themselves, they don’t have any stress. If we want robots to understand the world like a human can, we can communicate with humans in a natural way.
Warner took that idea and began researching it. He started with fMRI data measuring brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen, but it didn’t work. His friend then suggested trying a polygraph (the lie detector test) that works by capturing sweat data, and he began to find some success.
“I was shocked at how quickly I could go from capturing sweat data for me and a few friends and training this model where robots can have emotional compositions based solely on sweat data,” Warner said.
He has since expanded to other areas from sweat data, including body temperature, heart rate, and photobotany, which measure changes in blood volume, such as microvascular levels in the skin.
Warner launched Intempus in September 2024 and spent the first four months exclusively studying. He spent the last few on the combinations to build these emotional abilities for the robots and attract potential customers. He has already signed seven Enterprise Robotics Partners.
Intempus is also part of Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship program’s current cohort. This will bring the young entrepreneurs to $200,000 to drop out of school and build a company in two years.
Warner said the next step for Intempus is to hire – he’s done everything as a team up to now – and has gotten some of the technology already built in front of humans to start testing. Although Intempus is currently working on modifying existing robots and is working on plans to focus on it, Warner said it would never rule out Intempus from building its own emotionally intelligent robots in the future.
“I have a lot of robots, and they run a lot of emotions, and I just want to come and realize that this robot is a fun robot. “I think I can really prove that I’ve done this over the next 4-6 months.”
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