Robotics for Screen

I help storytellers bring robots to life — not just as props, but as believable, character-driven systems grounded in real engineering. My background is in robotics at OpenAI, Apple, and MIT. On set, that translates into work on robot articulation, technical dialogue for engineer characters, and collaboration with VFX.

I don’t just advise on how something could work — I help decide why it matters to the story and how it feels when it does.

The OpenAI work

A lot of what I bring to film comes from leading mechanical engineering on OpenAI’s robotic dexterity research. We used a Shadow Robot Company hand and trained policies in simulation that transferred to the real hardware. The most well-known result is the Rubik’s Cube demo:

Background reading: OpenAI — Learning Dexterity. The underlying papers are indexed on Google Scholar (most-cited: Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation and Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand).

Press & references

• The New Yorker — A Revolution in How Robots Learn (Dec 2024) — references the OpenAI dexterity work I led the mechanical engineering on.
• MachinePix Weekly #9 — an interview about the prosthetics work and the move into robotic dexterity at OpenAI.
• Hackaday — FitSocket is a Portal to Better Prostheses (Nov 2019) — the MIT prosthetics work that came before OpenAI.
• Boston Globe — MIT lab develops next-generation prosthetics for amputees (Sep 2015).

Working with me

If you’re a filmmaker with a robot in your story and you want it to actually feel like a robot — its constraints, its learning, the way an engineer would talk about it, the way it would fail — drop me a line. I’ve also been writing up some of this thinking as a course on robotics for screen.