Episode 144 - Charlie Andersen and Shelby Allen from Burro

"Every Burro turns on with 12 eyes … and if one robot makes a mistake in a train depot yard in Australia, or an airport in South America, or doing vegetation management alongside a road in Pennsylvania, the entire fleet learns from that lesson.” For years, autonomous robots largely stayed indoors, confined to the predictable aisles of warehouses and factories. Leveraging his experience growing up working on a farm, Burro Co-Founder and CEO Charlie Andersen sought to develop rugged autonomous robots that work safely and effectively alongside people in the messy, ever-changing conditions of the great outdoors. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with Andersen and Burro marketing coordinator Shelby Allen to explore how the company went from “three guys and a dog named Meg” working out of an unheated barn to a fleet of roughly 750 robots that haul, tow, mow, spray, and patrol across agricultural and industrial sites worldwide. The conversation covers why building autonomy that works near people outdoors is far harder than automating big machines or indoor warehouses, and how “physical AI” adds a crucial third leg — training data — to the traditional hardware-and-software stack. Anderson explains how a larger fleet means more “eyes on the world,” compounding learning across every unit, and why the company’s surprising surge of industrial demand (now roughly a third of its fleet) prompted its first appearance at Automate 2026. Additional topics include the Burro Grande 44, the “Swiss cheese” model of safety, the role of large language models and voice commands on mobile robots, user privacy and data sovereignty, and why Andersen believes the U.S. has a major opportunity to lead as physical AI meets outdoor work. Support the show