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Humanoid robots are learning to move the way people do. But they have almost no data on what the human brain does during the same tasks. Where brain data fits in robotics is still an open question.
Our board member Dr. Luis Sentis knows the robotics side of that question well. He is a co-founder of Apptronik, the Austin company behind the Apollo humanoid robot. Apptronik closed a Series A of more than $935 million in February 2026.
Robots that work next to people
Sentis has spent his career on one problem. How do you build robots that can work safely and usefully alongside humans? He is a professor of aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. There he directs the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory.
He led UT Austin's team in the DARPA Robotics Challenge with NASA Johnson Space Center. That work helped design NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot. Apptronik later spun out of NASA-sponsored research in his lab. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.
The brain side
Neurable builds AI that reads brain signals from everyday hardware, starting with headphones. Sentis joined our board in April. He has spent his career on the robotics side of the question. We work on the brain side.
Header photo: The University of Texas at Austin.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
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