ZurichRobotics #4

Seif Ismail (Founding Engineer, Watney Robotics): Conway's Law in Robotics Over the past two years building and deploying robots at Watney, we arrived at a set of counterintuitive lessons that fundamentally reshaped how we think about robot systems. Deployability and scalability became the driving principles behind every technical and organizational decision: hardware architectures optimized for serviceability, software systems prioritized simplicity, robustness, and generalizability over novelty and operations evolved into a first-class engineering discipline rather than an afterthought. Deploying useful robots requires complete alignment at all company levels, and the real-world constraints that come with it paradoxically produce better research and engineering outcomes. Drawing from concrete deployment experiences, this talk argues that the future of scalable robotics will not be determined solely by breakthroughs in model capability or hardware sophistication, but by organizations capable of aligning every function—from engineering to operations—around the realities of deployment.

Victor Klemm (PhD, ETH Zurich): Robots with…