What if airports had self-driving mobility pods that could safely navigate through crowds, just like something out of The Jetsons? Or, like the Pixar move Wall-E?
In this episode of TechFirst, I sit down with Matthew Anderson, CEO of A&K Robotics, to explore the future of autonomous mobility. A&K Robotics is building AI-powered self-driving pods designed to help people navigate airports independently without relying on wheelchairs or staff assistance.
But the real breakthrough isn’t just autonomy: it’s crowd navigation. Matthew explains why navigating dense, unpredictable crowds is one of the hardest problems in robotics, and how A&K’s “crowd-centric AI” could become foundational technology for airports, stadiums, smart cities, conferences, and even humanoid robots in the future.
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Watch our conversation here:
We also discuss:
- Why airports are the perfect proving ground for robotics
- The AI and sensor stack powering autonomous mobility
- Directional sound systems inspired by The Sphere in Las Vegas
- Scaling robotics startups from prototype to deployment
- Raising an $8M Series A round
- The personal story that inspired Matthew to build the company
- Why the future of robotics depends on moving safely through human environments
Transcript: This Wall-E self-driving pod is the future of wheelchairs
John Koetsier: Is WALL-E the future of human transportation? Hello and welcome to TechFirst, my name is John Koetsier. Today, I’m sitting down with Matt Anderson. He’s the CEO of A&K Robotics, and we’re gonna talk about self-driving mobility pods for airports, crowd navigation AI, and the future of autonomous transportation.
From robotics to accessibility to scaling a startup, this is a fascinating look at where mobility and autonomy is heading next.
Who the heck are you?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So John, thanks for having me. I’m Matt, and I’m the CEO of A&K Robotics.
John Koetsier: I’ve been hearing about you guys for a while. You’re doing some cool stuff. Wasn’t always able to get into it. Thirty seconds, 60 seconds, what are you building?
Matthew Anderson: So we’re building a self-driving mobility pod. We call them Cruise, and it helps people get around in airports.
So for people that have mobility challenges, rather than having to rely on wheelchairs and staff to get where they want to go, they can simply walk up to one of our pods, sit down, input where they want to go, and it’ll take them anywhere in the airport autonomously.
John Koetsier: Wall-E is here. Where’s mine?
Matthew Anderson: Yes.
John Koetsier: This is like Jetsons in real life.
Yeah. It’s really funny because I’ve read your brief, and we’ll get to your funding, which is pretty cool and interesting as well. But we’re at a conference here. We’re at Web Summit Vancouver, and it’s cool and it’s big. Nowhere near as big as CES, and I was just thinking, you’re designing your solution for airports, transportation hubs, other places like that, maybe even hospitals.
We’ll get into all that stuff, what you’re thinking. Imagine having this at CES. I’ve got a bad knee right now, and I wouldn’t mind one.
Matthew Anderson: You know, that’s interesting that you ask that because at CES, some of the organizers were telling us that one of the biggest challenges is getting around at the conference.
You’ve got these long walking distances.
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Matthew Anderson: But nothing autonomous can solve that without the hardest part, which is crowd-centric AI, and that’s specifically our DNA. That’s the secret sauce of what we’ve built, is how do you get through a crowd? And we’re starting in airports, but like you said, it expands into much more than that beyond airports. So smart cities, transit hubs, conferences, stadiums—
John Koetsier: Cool.
Cool everywhere. I was in an airport, I want to say Denver, I could be wrong, and there were autonomous vacuums going around. I’m five years old at heart, and I’m standing in front of it.
Matthew Anderson: Aren’t we all?
John Koetsier: What is it gonna do? Is it gonna go around? It was very good. It didn’t hit me or anything like that.
Talk about your crowd control or crowd navigation AI. How hard was that?
Matthew Anderson: Oh man, that’s the hardest part, and that’s what we’ve been working really hard on for so many years. The easy part—or the hard part is not getting through a building autonomously, navigating through a building. The hard part is navigating through a crowd.
And so there’s a few reasons why we’re in airports. One is because of the big pain point and demand that they have right here, right now. But the other reason, from a technological and sort of a nerd perspective, is if you can solve autonomous navigation through a crowded airport, you can solve autonomous navigation through almost anything.
John Koetsier: The light bulb just sort of turned on in my brain here a second, because when we think about this autonomous pod that gets somebody who’s maybe aged, maybe infirm, maybe had an injury, whatever, and needs to get from point A to point B, that’s one challenge. And navigating some people is another challenge.
But airports are quite interesting here because we’ve all seen the lineup when a flight opens and everybody gets in a line, and you have a solid wall of people through the entire corridor. And to get through, you kind of have to insert yourself through. And what do you do in that scenario?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah.
So basically, our AI system is accounting for thousands of things every minute. We have over 30 sensors per pod, and just like humans taking into account thousands of things every minute when we’re figuring out how to get through a crowd, our robots are doing exactly the same thing. So not only where are our obstacles, but how are they moving?
What direction? What speed? What’s the spacing between them? And really understanding intelligently the flow of passengers. And that’s really what sets us apart from other traditional mobile robots. Other robots can go into spaces, but they always have to give the right of way to people because they can’t go with the flow.
And if we envision a future where robots are all around us, humanoid robots or whatever, in our daily lives, they’re going to have to have this autonomy layer for crowd navigation, and that’s where we come in.
John Koetsier: That’s really interesting. I mean, we’ve all seen the videos of a Tesla under self-driving, and it’s sort of inching forward, and it’s not sure what to do.
Can I go? Can I not go? All that stuff. Do you have a horn? Can you move traffic? I mean, those things that are driven by people these days in airports, they’ve got horns or dinging or something, and people gotta get out of the way.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So we have a full end-to-end system, and it includes a lot of different things for a lot of different scenarios, including directional sound.
So at an airport—we’re at the Vancouver Airport—one of the nice things about Vancouver Airport, you’ve been here because we’re here in BC right now, is that it’s a very enjoyable airport to be at most of the time, especially if you’re in international departures, which is where we focus right now over there.
It’s a peaceful environment with natural Pacific Northwest sounds, and the sound of aggressive horns as the golf carts are driving by is one of the banes of people at the airport. And so for us, we have this directional sound where if the volumes of the airport are higher, our volume automatically goes up.
If the airport is quieter, our volume goes down, and we direct the sound in the direction of the people that need to be notified that we’re coming by. So if someone’s sitting down at a bench and reading a book and enjoying their peaceful time, and there’s a person that we need to notify on the right-hand side, we will notify the person on the right that we’re coming by, but not the person on the left that’s sitting at the bench, so we’re not disturbing their peace.
And we’re accounting for all these different nuanced details, which really adds to the enjoyment and the atmosphere of these airports that we’re in.
John Koetsier: That’s super sophisticated directional sound. I’ve experienced that at The Sphere in Las Vegas, right? Where you walk onto a one-meter square space or something like that, and you hear something.
You step out of it, you don’t hear it. That’s what you’re talking about?
Matthew Anderson: Exactly.
John Koetsier: Wow. Yeah. Very cool. Okay, I like that, so I don’t have to hear that beep, beep, beep all the time.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah.
John Koetsier: Just if I gotta get out of the way.
Matthew Anderson: Exactly. So this is one of the big differences between mobile robots in warehouses, where it’s all utilitarian, and what we’re building.
What we’re building, you kind of compare it to an iPhone compared to a Nokia. A Nokia will reliably make the phone call, but an iPhone is all about the experience, and that’s one of our big things for our company. We’re building a product people actually want to use.
Taking a stressful experience and turning it into an empowering and enjoyable experience. We want to make airports fun to be at, like they used to be.
John Koetsier: Okay. Wow. You said 30 sensors. That’s a lot of sensors. I’m guessing you’re going multimodal here. You probably have some sound sensors. What else do you have? LIDAR? What have you got on there?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So we’ve basically got almost everything that you can think of. The one thing we don’t have is GPS, and that’s probably going to be added eventually, but we wanted to show that we could work in GPS-deprived environments, which was a hard task to do, and we did it.
But yeah, we’ve got sonars, we’ve got LIDARs, 2D LIDARs, 3D LIDARs, IMUs, heat sensors, basically everything. And it’s really about taking into account all of that data to make smart decisions about how to get around safely and reliably and in a way that feels comfortable as well.
John Koetsier: If this thing loses network access, does it still work?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. It works completely in the dark. But we also have a fleet management system on the back end where we can see all of the pods, where they are within the airport, deploy them as needed throughout the different parts of the terminals, and make decisions at sort of an executive level as well.
John Koetsier: You’ve heard about dark factories. Now we’re gonna have dark airports. Why do we need to see? The robot knows where it’s going.
Matthew Anderson: It’s an interesting thing. Yeah. Well, I guess the person on the pod will still need to get to see where they’re going.
John Koetsier: Yeah. I’m just being facetious.
Matthew Anderson: Absolutely. But it is an interesting thing.
And so, yeah, when the airports are quiet and the pods need to redistribute from a quiet or closed part of the airport to a part of the airport that’s lively, they can go in the dark through the airport and get to the parts of the airport that really do have that demand.
John Koetsier: Interesting.
When you onboard a new customer, an airport or some other place, do you go through a mapping stage?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So we do. Our pods can work autonomously without mapping. It’s called SLAM, simultaneous localization and mapping. So they can do that, but we don’t let them because the issue is, well, how does the robot know the areas within the airport that it’s allowed to go to and the areas it’s not allowed to go to?
So we go in and we map the environment in advance. It takes us about half a day to do about 500,000 square feet, and then we do refinement over time to work with the customers to make sure that the robots know where they’re allowed to go and where they’re not allowed to go.
John Koetsier: Also, if you’ve mapped it, then you have a better idea about what’s the fastest route from A to B or A to C or something like that, I assume.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah, fastest routes. The pods actually do a lot of that analysis on their own. What’s the fastest route? And that accounts for the flow of people, right?
Because when it’s empty, the fastest route is the beeline. It’s as the crow flies. But when there’s a crowd, it’s not as the crow flies. You have to account for the flow, and so that’s a big part of it.
John Koetsier: This is a really mature solution. You’ve thought of a lot of the problems, a lot of the things.
Quite often you come out with a product and it does the job, but it doesn’t have all these refinements and additions. That’s pretty impressive.
Matthew Anderson: Well, thanks. Yeah. You’re touching on an interesting subject because the challenge that we’re facing—we’ve solved the hardest challenge, which is autonomous navigation through a crowd.
But if you were to ask me what my biggest challenge is today, we’ve actually already solved a lot of that part. We’ve been working on it hard for 10 years now. It’s been a long time.
Now it’s about scaling. And how do we scale? Specifically, it’s about integration. So right now, my biggest challenge is integration.
And we’re solving that with this end-to-end solution, everything from the core hardware to the software to the AI, all the way to the fleet management, the connectivity between pods.
And it’s really having that end-to-end full system, all these nuanced details, that allow us to make sure that our customers see a pod that always works and that people enjoy using when they come to the airport.
John Koetsier: Do they go and charge at a recharge station or something like that?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So right now it’s early stages for our company. We plug them in at the end of the day, and we unplug them at the start of the day.
But we do have docking stations, and the long-term vision for that within airports is that we’ll have these sleek docking stations throughout the airport. They’ll automatically dock on their own, charge in between uses, and there’ll be a distributed system.
So no matter where you are within the airport, you’ll be able to see one within line of sight and use it when you’re at the terminal.
John Koetsier: Oh, and maybe if you have the airport app, you can even summon one, call one.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So right now we have our own app, but in the future it’ll be integrated with APIs into the airlines and airport apps.
John Koetsier: Airports are always pushing their apps. I’ve never seen a reason to actually download one. If I needed one of these things, that’d be a reason.
Okay. So you just raised, I believe it was $8 million.
Matthew Anderson: Yes. $8 million Canadian. Very good. And we’re really excited about that.
John Koetsier: Cool. What round is that? What are you doing with it?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. So it’s our A round. It’s a long time coming, and it’s really just going to allow us to scratch the surface of the potential here.
So right now we’re working with two really great customers in Madrid. There’s a company called Aena. Aena’s the largest airport operator in the world. They own over 60 airports, so that’s our first major European customer.
And in Canada here, in North America, we’ve got the Vancouver International Airport. The Vancouver International Airport is rated the top airport in North America, which is a great customer to have in our own backyard.
They’re a really great group to work with and a leader in many respects, both in terms of passenger experience, but also innovation and profitability as well, so the economics of everything.
So we’re working with these two customers, and now we’re going to use this to be able to go out and target some of the customers that have been knocking on our door asking to do pilots with us that we’ve had to decline up until now.
So we’ve got growing demand, and now we’re going to be able to use these funds to go after those airports that want to work with us.
John Koetsier: So my mind’s a little bit blown because I’ve seen your solution, and it looks nice, looks amazing. It looks really polished. You built that and delivered that on a seed round.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. Pre-seed and seed and maybe a seed extension. We’ve had a few small rounds up until now.
And I’ll give all the credit for that to my team working long hours, many days of the week, more than five days a week a lot of the time, and really putting the blood, sweat, and tears into seeing this through.
And the people on our team join us because they like the vision, and we’re all rallied around this vision of bringing autonomy into everyday lives. And that’s how we’re able to accomplish so much with so little.
John Koetsier: Where did you come up with the idea for this particular startup? I mean, you’ve been hacking on robots since you were eight, and we’ll get into that because that’s an interesting story too.
But as an entrepreneur, you gotta pick a niche, you gotta pick a vertical, you gotta pick a space, and you decided on this. Why?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. It’s a good question, and there’s a lot of reasons why.
I’ve had a lot of different ideas. I had a particular interest in 3D printing when that came out many years ago.
I had a particular interest in drones. I was hacking my own drones to control these sort of off-the-shelf ones with my computer, trying to make them autonomous myself to fly around my living room.
I had a lot of different ideas.
John Koetsier: Repaint, repaint, repaint.
Matthew Anderson: Oh man. And give me a glass of whiskey, and we could talk all day about ideas. It’s a lot of fun.
John Koetsier: Whiskey?
Matthew Anderson: No.
So yeah. But the stars kind of aligned, and the more I dug into these different ideas, the more certain themes kept popping out.
And the idea of autonomous mobility sort of just kept coming back because every idea I had for drones or humanoid robots or what-have-you robots were all things that were part of our lives, and they all needed a way to get around.
And no one’s built this yet because Figure AI has raised a ton of capital. They’re doing great, amazing things. But right now, they have to focus on those great, amazing things. And later, when they need to get around through a crowd, they’re gonna need our crowd-centric navigation system to help them get through those crowds.
So we’re providing this missing link in the scaling of robots in general in the world.
And then this all ties into a personal story of mine, which is that I grew up with someone very close to me. I called him an uncle even though he wasn’t blood, but he lived with us, and he looked after me and my siblings growing up.
He had cerebral palsy. He was basically our babysitter, but we loved him very much. One of the smartest men I knew, but he couldn’t walk around easily. He was able to walk, but he’d fall over all the time. He couldn’t drive.
And I always envisioned a future kind of like “The Jetsons,” where regardless of your mobility status, you could get around anywhere you wanted and could fully participate in society.
And so this was a perfect combination of major market demand that’s growing rapidly, a bigger-picture blue-ocean opportunity—if we nail this in airports, it becomes much more than just airports—and then this personal passion of mine of helping people get around, which I think is important for society and is the reason why everybody on my team works really hard on what we’re building.
John Koetsier: Not much to say there. That’s amazing. That’s wonderful. That’s really, really cool.
What was interesting, what kind of piqued my interest before you told the story of why you picked this particular space, it sounds like you have a multimodal monetization model. One is the hardware, software, ecosystem management package, whole thing, take it, there you go.
The other, it kind of sounds like this crowd-centric AI, you might license that to somebody.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah, it’s definitely in the cards.
Right now we’re razor-focused on airports because it’s a big market, and we are going to dominate this market. It’s about a $5 billion-per-year spend on helping people get around, and it’s growing 10 to 15% per year.
Airport travel is growing about 5% per year, which is quite a lot because people’s disposable incomes are going up and people are traveling more than normal.
But this is growing 10 to 15% per year, far outpacing normal air travel, which means it’s basically doubling every four to five years.
So we’ve got this major market—I would classify it as a major niche market—that we have the chance to dominate. So we’re razor-focused on that.
But there are a lot of applications outside of this, and definitely in the cards in the next few years.
John Koetsier: And there’s so many other possibilities and potential, right? I mean, there are a lot of mobility solutions that people need for getting around their home, getting around their city, their village, their town.
So we see it all the time. Very, very, very cool.
You said some of the next steps already. You’ve had customers knocking on the door, and you say, “We can’t do a pilot with you, sorry. We’re focusing on where we’re focusing.”
Now you’ve got some extra capital. You must be adding some people and adding some engineering potential, maybe even adding some production potential.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. A little bit of all of the above, basically.
So we’re going to be doubling in size this year, going from about 10 people to about 20 people.
And we’re hiring for marketing, sales, all the things that up until now, it’s just me and my great co-founder Jessica have been doing ourselves, wearing five hats each.
So sales, marketing, deployments, manufacturing a little bit, but definitely also expanding our R&D as well.
We’re ahead of the game right now for where we’re at relative to the market, but we have our sights set on many more things we want to build.
And so if we have an audience here who’s listening, people that are interested in doing something impactful, good for the world, and also like where the challenges are unlimited and paired with that the opportunities are unlimited, reach out to us because we’re definitely looking to hire great people for our team.
John Koetsier: Awesome.
I do want to circle back on something because I saw in your bio on LinkedIn you’ve been hacking and playing with robots since you were eight years old.
I don’t know how old you are right now. You look like you’re in your 20s. I could be wrong.
Matthew Anderson: Thank you, John.
John Koetsier: You have the AC/DC shirt, so maybe that’s a little telling.
Matthew Anderson: My first tape was AC/DC.
My mom—I bought the tape at a dollar store, and my mom found the tape, and she confiscated it. She said, “You’re not allowed to listen to this.”
John Koetsier: What was the name of that album?
Matthew Anderson: Oh man. I don’t remember.
John Koetsier: It probably wasn’t something very great.
Matthew Anderson: You know, I remember I eventually kind of snuck it back from my mom.
I snuck into her drawer and took it, and I remember listening to it that first time and thinking, “Wow, this music’s not as good as I thought it was going to be.”
John Koetsier: Shoot. Well, somehow you turned out to be a big fan. You’re wearing it right now.
But you’re hacking robots since you were eight. I mean, you obviously have an engineer’s mindset.
Matthew Anderson: You know, I know enough to be dangerous, but it’s really the people on my team that really make the magic happen.
But if I wasn’t an entrepreneur doing this with Jessica, I would just be building stuff all the time.
And even to this day, on weekends and evenings, I definitely love studying math challenges, learning physics, coding a little bit on the side.
And with all these tools nowadays, you can code quite a lot as a non-coder.
John Koetsier: Exactly.
Matthew Anderson: And so it’s just a really exciting time all around, but there’s no lack of fun in my company in what we’re doing.
Definitely lots of challenges and hard times, but no lack of challenges, and those challenges are fun for someone like me.
John Koetsier: If it’s not fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.
And if it’s fun and you love it, and it’s still work—and there are parts that are work—but it’s not really work. It’s not work-work.
It’s enjoyable work, and so that’s why you spend the extra hours, and that’s why you’re there long nights and doing the stuff.
Matthew Anderson: Because you’re enjoying it while you’re doing it.
You know, in a former life, I was an accountant, a chartered accountant, and I was okay at it.
John Koetsier: What happened in your misspent youth to become an accountant?
Matthew Anderson: There are a lot of—
John Koetsier: What trauma assaulted you?
Matthew Anderson: Yeah, right?
Oh man, every time I meet another accountant, I reach out to shake their hand and I say, “I’m so sorry.”
John Koetsier: Just give them a hug next time. Just go straight for the hug.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. No, accountants are really important.
John Koetsier: They are. They’re wonderful people, I agree.
But if you’re a tinkerer, if you’re an inventor, if you’re a gadget maker, if you’re like, “I want to take this apart, find out how it works, and put it back together, and break it, and then fix it,” and all that stuff—if you’re that person, then accountancy may not be where your heart will breathe.
Matthew Anderson: Yeah. I mean, there’s a bit of a long story about why I went into that in college when I had to make a decision.
John Koetsier: Pick something you can make money at, son.
Matthew Anderson: Not too far off. Not too far off.
But yeah, full circle to, you know, I was doing okay in that, but I knew where my real passion was. And so when I had a chance, and all my brothers and sisters were successful on their own, and I didn’t have to worry about family things, I was like, “Now’s the chance to put everything on the line.”
And every day I’m so grateful for the things I get to do.
Whether it’s successful or not, it’s so much fun every day.
John Koetsier: Good, good. Pass along the bug.
Well, thanks so much for this time, Matthew. I really appreciate it, and appreciate hearing the story, the personal story, the motivation, and what you’re doing right now. Wish you the best of success.
Matthew Anderson: John, thank you so much for having me, and great to be here with you.