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Aaed Musa

Things Aaed Says on Podcasts

Builds quadrupedal robots as a mechanical engineering student, best known for CARA, a robot dog driven by rope-based capstan drives instead of gears, and its low-cost successor CARA 2.0, plus the fully 3D-printed TOPS. Documents his builds on his own YouTube channel, which has drawn a large following, and appeared as a guest on the Embedded podcast to talk about why home robots should start small and simple.

Where to Find Them

Aaed Musa has been a guest on Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman and Embedded .

Recently: “534: I Think We'll Add a Head ” on Embedded (September 2026); “Inside the Maker Mindset with Roboticist Aaed Musa” on Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman (August 2025).

What They Said

“Humanoids just aren't quite ready for the home yet. They're a huge safety hazard.” — Aaed Musa, Embedded

Musa is explaining why his company builds quadrupedal home robots rather than humanoids, after a host asks whether he is making another military dog. He argues the 150-pound machines drawing all the attention still cannot do a household task like dishes or laundry, autonomously or not, and that something smaller has to come first.

Embedded · 2026-09-18 Permalink → Listen →
Embedded Around 54:34 into the episode
Aaed Musa

Yeah, I think it's, yeah, Isaac Sim, I think, is, especially because NVIDIA is like leading the semiconductor industry right now. Their software is very important.

Speaker 4

So Mecca is making quadrupedal robots, and you're looking at reinforcement learning for behaviors. Is this going to be another one of those military dogs?

Aaed Musa

…can play with with your kids. We want something that feels real, something that is expressive, something that is emotive. And yeah, that's the goal. We want a cool home robot because we really don't have any robots out in the world that are doing that, that can be in the home right now. A lot of people are focusing on humanoids. And that's been the big buzz in the robotics world. I don't know. Humanoids just aren't quite ready for the home yet. They're a huge safety hazard. These things are like 150 plus pounds. And, you know, what people are promising that they're going to do is just realistically like another five to 10 years away. There's no humanoid right now today that can go into any home and do a task like wash your dishes or do your laundry non-autonomously or autonomously. There's no humanoid that can that can do that today. And so we think we think we'll…

Speaker 4

I like the things you listed: carry your groceries, play with your kids. Those are two different weight classes, though. Carrying your groceries, it has to be massive enough to withstand my groceries. But playing with kids, I don't want it to be more than 20 pounds at that.

Aaed Musa

Yeah. Yeah. Great point. And so that's sort of the goal weight we're targeting as well, around like 20, 20-ish pounds. And yeah, with a 20-pound robot, you can carry some groceries. Maybe not like all of the, like, probably is not going to be able to carry like 20 pounds of groceries, like double…

Elecia White

I spend quite a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make sure my robot will not fall and kill somebody. It's very distressing.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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