Teddy Warner, a 19-year-old robotics enthusiast, is on a mission to make robots more human-like through his company, Intempus. Born into a family with deep roots in the industry, Warner spent his high school years working in a machinist shop, nurturing his passion for robotics. Now, he's building a company that aims to revolutionize the way humans interact with robots by giving them human-like emotional expressions.

Intempus is developing technology that can retrofit existing robots, enabling them to display emotions through kinetic movements. Warner believes that humans derive a significant amount of subconscious signals from the movement of arms and torso, not just facial expressions or semantics. This concept extends beyond humans, as it also applies to animals like dogs and cats.

The inspiration for Intempus struck Warner while he was working at AI research lab Midjourney. He realized that many AI research labs, including Midjourney, were focusing on world AI models. These models aim to understand and make decisions based on the dynamics of the real world and spatial properties, rather than just cause and effect. However, Warner identified a challenge: many of the robots used to train these models lacked spatial reasoning capabilities.

"Robots currently go from A to C, that is observation to action, whereas humans, and all living things, have this intermediary B step that we call physiological state," Warner explained. "Robots don’t have physiological state. They don’t have fun, they don’t have stress. If we want robots to understand the world like a human can, and be able to communicate with humans in a way that is innate to us, that is less uncanny, more predictable, we have to give them this B step."

To achieve this, Warner began researching various methods. Initially, he experimented with fMRI data, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen. However, this approach didn't yield the desired results. Then, a friend suggested using a polygraph (lie detector test), which captures sweat data. This suggestion led to a breakthrough in Warner's research.

"I was shocked at how quickly 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 solely based on sweat data," Warner said. Since then, he has expanded his research to include other biometric data, such as body temperature, heart rate, and photoplethysmography, which measures blood volume changes in the microvascular level of the skin.

In September 2024, Warner launched Intempus and spent the first four months exclusively on research. He then shifted his focus to building emotional capabilities for robots and engaging potential customers. To date, Intempus has signed seven enterprise robotics partners.

Intempus is also part of Peter Thiel's Thiel Fellowship program, which provides young entrepreneurs with $200,000 over two years to drop out of school and build their companies.

Looking ahead, Warner plans to hire more team members and start testing the technology with humans. While Intempus is currently focused on retrofitting existing robots, Warner is open to the possibility of building its own emotionally intelligent robots in the future.

"I have a bunch of robots, and they run a bunch of emotions, and I want to have someone come in and just understand that this robot is a joyful robot, and if I can innately convey some emotion, some intents that the robot holds, then I’ve done my job properly," Warner said. "I think I can, you know, really prove that I’ve done this over the next four to six months."