“It’s more than just robot vacuum cleaners,” he continues. “I think more and more people are saying, ‘Yeah, I could do a driverless car,’ which is actually a robot. I could do virtual reality — that’s an outgrowth of robotics. I can do 3D printing — that’s also the domain of robotics and manufacturing. The list goes on and on.”

Increasingly, said list includes humanoid robots, which Oh knows well firsthand: In 2022, students in his Drones and Autonomous Systems Lab advanced to the finals of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, a worldwide competition to create a human-robot avatar system in Long Beach, California.

The students’ creation, named Avatar-Hubo, placed 11th overall.

More recently, humanoid robots have made national news, as Oh notes: Last month at global AI conference Nvidia GTC, which is put on by tech company Nvidia and draws tens of thousands of participants annually to San Jose, California, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage with nine humanoid robots and introduced the company’s “Project Groot” endeavor, which will invest heavily in the further development of the technology.

“2024 is the Year of Humanoid. There’s no robot hardware more general-purpose,” Nvidia Research Manager Dr. Jim Fan posted on X. “We are all in.”

Tesla is also getting in the game with its Optimus humanoid robot prototype, the latest version of which was unveiled last December.

McMullen’s attempting to take things even further: He wants his robots to appear and act more like people, to serve any number of hypothetical purposes, from greeting you at the grocery and guiding you to the shampoo aisle if you need some Head and Shoulders to delivering meds and checking your vitals at the hospital to being an always-there-for-you life companion when you need someone — or some thing— to have a chat with.

AI’s growing prevalence in our daily lives has stoked plenty of fears. Will robots one day replace us mere flesh-and-bone mortals? Will they be our trusty sidekicks or go all “M3gan” on us? Will we eventually have to war with our smart toasters when machines rise up to challenge their human creators, Skynet-style? But McMullen’s not only embracing those fears, he’s turning them on their meticulously-sculpted robot heads.

And he’s doing it all in a nondescript, mid-sized studio tucked behind his home in the northwest side of town.

McMullen grins at the thought.

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