Why Intempus thinks robots should have a human physiological state

Teddy Warner, 19, has always been interested in robotics. His family was in the industry and he says he “grew up” in high school in a machinist store. Now Warner is building its own robot company, Intempus, that robots seems to make a little more human.

Intempus Build Tech to better predict existing robots with human -like emotional expressions afterwards to help people better communicate with these machines and better predict their movements. By giving these robots that have human reactions, data will also produce that can be used to better train AI models.

These robots will show expression through kinetic movements, Warner told WAN.

“People derive many from our subconscious signals, not out of the face, not from semantics, but only from the movement of your arms and your hull,” Warner said. “This extends to dogs and cats and other animals that are not people.”

Warner said he got the idea for Intempus while working at AI Research Lab Midjourney. He said that Midjourney, like many other AI research laboratories, worked on World AI models, or AI models that understand and take decisions based on the dynamics of the real world and spatial properties, in contrast to the cause and effect.

But it will be very difficult for these models to achieve this spatial reasoning, Warner realized, because much of the data on which the models were trained came from robots that did not have this spatial reasoning either.

“Robots are currently going from A to C, that is observation to action, while people and all living beings have these intermediary B -step that we call physiological state,” Warner said. “Robots do not have a physiological state. They have no pleasure, they have no stress. If we want robots to understand the world as a human perspective and are able to communicate with people in a way that is innate to us, that is less creepy, more predictable, we have to give them this B -step.”

Warner took that idea and started investigating. He started with FMRI data, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen, but it didn’t work. Then his friend suggested to try a polygraaf (lie detector test), who works by capturing sweat data, and he started to find some success.

“I was shocked about how fast I could go from capturing sweat data for myself and a few of my friends and then training this model that can essentially allow robots to have an emotional composition based on sweat data,” Warner said.

Since then he has been extensively from sweat data to other areas, such as body temperature, heart rate and photplethysmography, which measures the blood volume in the microvascular level of the skin, among other things.

Warner launched Intempus in September 2024 and spent the first four months exclusively with research. He has spent the last pair on a mix of building these emotional possibilities for robots and involving potential customers. He has already signed seven Enterprise Robotics partners.

Intempus is also part of Peter Thiel’s current cohort Thiel Fellowship ProgramWhat young entrepreneurs give $ 200,000 for two years to stop school and build their companies.

Warner said that the next step before Intempus is to hire – he has done everything as a team of one – and gets part of the technology that has already been built for people to start testing. While Intempus is currently working on the retrospect of existing robots and is planning to concentrate on this, Warner said that he would never build his own emotionally intelligent robots in the future.

“I have a bunch of robots, and they have a bunch of emotions, and I want someone to come in and just understand that this robot is a joyful robot, and if I can naturally convey some emotion, some of the intentions that the robot holds, I have done my work well,” Warner said. “I think, you know, you can really prove that I have done this for the next four to six months.”