Foundation’s 20-Minute Uncut Walking Video Is Deliberately Unimpressive

Foundation Robotics CEO Sankaet Pathak has shared a 20-minute, unedited video of the company's Phantom humanoid walking on and off a gantry. In an industry now accustomed to highly-produced demos of robots running, dancing, or performing complex tasks, this video stands out: the gait is slow, rudimentary, and lacks the natural fluidity seen from competitors.

A Bet on Generalization, Not Gains

In a post accompanying the video, Pathak explained the significance of the test. "This is a 20-minute unedited on/off-gantry run from today," he wrote. "What's special about it is that no gains were tuned on the robot before we started running the policy."

He identified the system as a "DVBF-based motion policy," noting the goal is "to ensure policies can be deployed on many robots at once without manual gain adjustment before the policy runs reliably on each robot."

In short, Foundation is showcasing a bet on policy generalization over peak performance. While competitors might spend significant time manually tuning a policy for a single, specific robot, Pathak claims this DVBF-based policy can be deployed on any of their robots "out of the box." This "sim-to-real" transfer, where an AI policy trained in simulation works immediately on physical hardware with minimal tweaking, is a notoriously difficult challenge in robotics.

A Different AI Path

This focus on Deep Variational Bayes Filters (DVBFs) is core to Foundation's strategy. The company has previously detailed its AI approach, led by Prof. Dr. Patrick van der Smagt, which aims to give its robots a deeper "understanding of physics" rather than relying purely on imitation or reinforcement learning (RL).

The demo also serves as a pointed follow-up to Pathak's previous assertions about bipedal robotics. Earlier this year, he argued that advancements in AI were rapidly solving bipedal walking, making it a more viable "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP) for new companies than traditional wheeled robots. This raw, un-tuned video appears to be his evidence of that development velocity.

Foundation continues to be one of the most controversial startups in the humanoid space, largely due to its unapologetic "dual-use" strategy. Pathak has been vocal about the company's intent to pursue military applications, including confirming that arming the robots is "on the table," a stance that puts it at odds with nearly all of its U.S.-based competitors.

This latest video, in its deliberate simplicity, reinforces the company's public posture: it is prioritizing and transparently showing the "boring" but scalable engineering, all while pursuing a path others in the field have publicly disavowed.