The Team
Six engineers. One problem.
Atom's founding team covers every capability required to take a humanoid from research concept to a machine that can work a factory shift — compliant actuator design, whole-body motion planning, multi-modal perception, real-time embedded control, and the manufacturing operations discipline to build and iterate physical hardware at pace.
Shunsuke Aoki
Co-Founder & CEO
Five years studying whole-body motion planning and imitation learning for humanoid systems at an industrial robotics research institution in Tokyo. Founded Atom in 2024 when the path from research to real factory deployment became an engineering problem rather than a science one. Leads technical direction, safety architecture decisions, and all customer briefings.
Keiko Tanabe
Head of Mechanical Engineering
Designed Atom's 29-DOF kinematic chain and joint actuator architecture. Background in series elastic actuator development for precision manufacturing automation — the mechanical foundation of the system's whole-body compliance. Responsible for joint design, structural tolerances, and the actuator-to-control-system interface specification.
Hiroshi Watanabe
Lead Perception Engineer
Built Atom's multi-modal perception stack from the ground up: structured-light depth sensor integration, RGB-based surface classification, fingertip tactile feedback, and the persistent scene graph that fuses all three in real time. Prior work on point-cloud-based grasp planning under heavy mutual occlusion — the core problem in industrial bin-picking that camera-only approaches do not solve.
Ryo Nakamura
Control Systems Engineer
Designed Atom's whole-body impedance controller and ZMP-based gait stability system. Background in model predictive control for legged locomotion — specifically the decoupled balance-and-manipulation architecture that allows simultaneous arm operation and stable walking on vibrating factory floors. Leads the motion planning and stance control stack.
Yuki Ishida
Manufacturing Operations Lead
Runs Atom's build-test-iterate cycle: prototyping workflow, component sourcing from Japanese precision parts suppliers, and the production discipline that turns engineering changes into physical hardware quickly. Background in manufacturing process design for precision electromechanical assemblies. Responsible for keeping the hardware programme on pace with the software team.
Daichi Fujimoto
Embedded Systems Engineer
Responsible for the joint controller hardware, RTOS-based real-time control loops, and the safety cutoff circuits — the hardware path that takes the torque-sensing signal from sensor to actuator compliance in under 2 ms with no software intermediary. Background in safety-critical embedded development for automotive control systems, where deterministic latency and hardware-level failsafe design are baseline requirements.