Carnegie Mellon spinout in Pittsburgh building physical-AI foundation models that let industrial robots grind, polish and weld high-mix parts.
Instinct Robotics is a Carnegie Mellon University spinout based at Mill 19, 4501 Lytle Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it leased a 3,000-square-foot office in 2025 according to the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC). The company develops AI foundation models for high-mix manufacturing, positioned as physical AI for the factory floor. Its models are trained on physical data collected in production environments and run on off-the-shelf industrial robots. The company names grinding, polishing, welding and coating as target tasks, and states that its system generalises to new parts without retraining or manual robot programming. Changliu Liu, an associate professor at the CMU Robotics Institute who leads its Intelligent Control Lab, is named by the ARM Institute as a co-founder.
The first product is a robotic grinding cell for finishing metal castings in high-mix foundries. It combines an industrial robot, a 3D scanner, an AI controller and an operator interface. The cell scans each casting as it sits in the fixture, plans a toolpath for that individual part, grinds, rescans and repeats until the part reaches the target, which the company says absorbs casting variation such as mold shift, flash and drift without precise fixturing or hand-taught programs. Operators work from a single-screen interface, and the company says training takes one shift with no robotics background. Prospective customers can send three representative castings, which Instinct runs at Mill 19 and returns with cycle times, finish quality and a deployment breakdown within five days.
The technology traces to an ARM Institute sponsored project begun in 2019, in which Carnegie Mellon worked with Siemens Corporate Technology, Siemens Energy and Yaskawa on automating the grinding of a turbine transition piece interior, followed by a 2022 ARM-supported collaboration that raised its technology readiness level. The approach combines perception, motion planning and learning-based force control for contact-rich processes. RIDC reports multi-million-dollar seed funding from Valor Equity Partners. In 2026 the company was recruiting robotics engineers in robot learning, perception, motion planning and control, and multimodal foundation models, as well as sales staff.
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https://www.instinct-robotics.comHEADQUARTERS
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System Integrator
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