Borg Robotics
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Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
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11 citations
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Borg Robotics (stylized as borg) is an American robotics company based in Detroit, Michigan, United States, that develops modular AI-powered humanoid robots and supporting autonomous systems for industrial automation. Founded in 2022 by Lorenzo Juncaj, the company leverages Detroit's industrial heritage and robotics ecosystem to build robots designed for repetitive and labor-intensive tasks in manufacturing and warehousing. Its flagship product is the Borg 01, a modular humanoid that can autonomously switch between bipedal and wheeled mobility configurations. Beyond the humanoid platform, Borg has expanded its lineup to include the Borg Arm cobot, the Borg L.01 autonomous pallet jack, and an in-house vision-language-action (VLA) system called The Orb that the company describes as the shared intelligence layer across its robot ecosystem.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Legal Name | Borg Robotics Inc. |
| Founded | January 2022 |
| Founder | Lorenzo Juncaj |
| Headquarters | Detroit, Michigan, United States |
| Industry | Robotics engineering |
| Specialties | Humanoid robots, AI, machine learning, industrial automation |
| Company Size | 2 to 10 employees |
| Website | borgrobotic.com |
| Tagline | Automate Any Workcell |
Borg positions itself as a Detroit-built challenger in the broader humanoid robotics race that includes companies such as Tesla (with Optimus), Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X Technologies, and Boston Dynamics. Unlike many of those firms, Borg targets industrial work cells from day one rather than research demos or general-purpose deployments, and it is one of the few American humanoid startups headquartered outside the Bay Area tech corridor.[1][2]
Borg Robotics was incorporated in January 2022 in Detroit, Michigan. Founder Lorenzo Juncaj established the company to revitalize American manufacturing through automation, drawing on the region's deep heritage in industrial robotics and automotive engineering. Juncaj, who also serves as the company's lead engineer, has stated publicly that Borg's first mission is to help solve labor shortages and high turnover in industrial sectors.[3][4]
In its early years, the company stayed largely in stealth, focusing on hardware development and on engineering its own actuators rather than relying on off-the-shelf components. According to industry coverage, the initial Borg 01 platform was designed by a small core team of just three engineers, with Juncaj joined publicly on LinkedIn by colleagues including Ziad Ammar and Peter Carter.[5][6]
In November 2024, Borg Robotics made its first major public appearance when it teased its robot lineup on social media. The reveal showed three configurations of the Borg 01 humanoid: a bipedal version, a wheeled version, and a hybrid configuration capable of switching between the two. The early teaser explicitly framed the robot for repetitive industrial tasks, with longer-term goals of expanding into household and caregiving applications.[1]
The Humanoid Hub, a robotics-focused account on X, helped amplify the reveal and was among the first outlets to publish a clean look at the platform. In December 2024, Borg shared additional footage giving a closer view of the modular design, emphasizing that the mobility system and end-effector swaps would eventually be handled autonomously by the robot itself rather than by a human operator.[2]
In April 2025, Borg Robotics published its own first-look video of Borg 01 from the company's official account. In that announcement Juncaj described the robot as purpose-built for industrial environments, drawing a sharp contrast with consumer-facing humanoids: "Borg 01 was built to work efficiently and quickly in industrial work cells. Unlike other humanoids built to dance, run, or perform tricks, Borg 01 was built" for actual factory output.[7]
Around the same time, Borg confirmed a target launch window in the second quarter of 2025 for an initial industrial trio: Borg 01, the Borg L.01 autonomous pallet jack, and a third robot that the company kept under wraps. Borg also stated that all three platforms would share a common autonomy stack so customers could deploy them as a connected fleet rather than as standalone tools.[3][7]
In September 2025, Borg Robotics published an autonomous logistics demonstration in which Borg 01 performed pick-and-place box handling with what the company described as no teleoperation. According to the company, every action shown was driven by onboard AI, and the demo was filmed at 1x speed. At the time, the robot moved at roughly 1 meter per second, around half of its target maximum speed of 2 meters per second (about 4.5 mph). Juncaj called this performance "the slowest it'll ever be," framing it as a baseline for future improvements.[5][8]
On October 22, 2025, Borg Robotics announced that it had increased Borg 01's autonomous box handling speed by approximately 40 percent compared with the September baseline. The update was shared on LinkedIn by Juncaj and on the company's social channels. The improvement was attributed to refinements in the AI control stack rather than to hardware changes, and it was presented as evidence that Borg was on track for production-grade throughput in customer work cells.[8]
On December 11 and 12, 2025, Lorenzo Juncaj appeared as a speaker at the Humanoids Summit Silicon Valley, held at the Computer History Museum. His talk, titled "The future of industrial automation," placed Borg Robotics on stage alongside larger and better-funded humanoid companies. The summit drew approximately 2,000 participants from 40 countries, with 75 speakers and 60 exhibitors, and represented one of Borg's highest-profile public appearances to date.[9]
Borg Robotics describes its overall offering as an integrated automation suite spanning humanoid, mobile, and stationary platforms, all coordinated by a shared software layer. The lineup is organized around the idea that a single customer should be able to automate an entire work cell using compatible Borg machines rather than stitching together robots from multiple vendors.
The Borg 01 is the company's flagship product: a modular humanoid robot designed for industrial environments. It combines a humanoid upper body with a swappable mobility base, allowing the same robot to operate either as a bipedal walker or as a wheeled mobile manipulator, depending on the work cell.[7][10]
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Height | 173 cm (5'8") |
| Weight | 62 kg (with battery) |
| Payload Capacity | Up to 12 kg |
| Degrees of Freedom | 23 |
| Maximum Speed | About 3 km/h (target 2 m/s) |
| Battery Life (wheeled) | Up to 6 hours per charge |
| Battery Swap | Hot-swappable in seconds |
| Reference Price (prototype) | Approximately US$100,000 |
| Mobility | Modular: bipedal legs or wheeled base |
| End Effectors | Vacuum grippers, dual grippers, five-fingered hands |
| Target Environments | Manufacturing, warehousing, logistics |
Borg 01's most distinctive feature is its modular architecture. The robot's mobility system can be quickly switched between bipedal legs and a wheeled base, depending on the requirements of the task or environment. The wheeled variant is optimized for facilities where flat, predictable floors make wheels faster and more energy-efficient, while the bipedal variant targets sites that include stairs, mixed terrain, or operator workstations originally designed for humans.[2][7]
The robot supports a variety of interchangeable end effectors, all of which are designed to be swapped autonomously by the robot itself rather than by a technician:
This modular approach allows a single Borg 01 unit to be reconfigured for different tasks across a shift without purchasing separate specialized robots, which the company argues lowers total cost of ownership for facilities running mixed workloads.[2][10]
The wheeled base version operates for up to six hours on a single charge. The battery system uses a hot-swap design that allows packs to be changed in seconds, enabling near-continuous operation across multiple shifts without the need for charging downtime. Borg has highlighted this hot-swap capability as a key requirement for 24-hour industrial duty cycles, where every minute of downtime translates into reduced throughput.[1][10]
Borg 01 carries multiple cameras and proximity sensors with a roughly 2-meter manipulation reach, feeding into onboard AI processors that run the company's own neural network stack. The autonomy stack handles object recognition, motion planning, navigation, and end-effector selection, and is designed to adapt to new tasks without manual reprogramming. Borg classifies the underlying software as closed-source proprietary code rather than as a research release.[10]
Alongside the humanoid, Borg sells the Borg Arm, a single-arm autonomous robot positioned as an industrial collaborative robot. The Borg Arm reuses the same actuators and software stack as the humanoid platform but is mounted on a fixed or mobile base for stationary work-cell tasks such as machine tending, kitting, and quality inspection. The company markets it for facilities that want a smaller upfront investment than a full humanoid while still benefiting from Borg's autonomy software.[3][6]
A heavy-load variant has been described publicly as a mobile industrial cobot with a 30 kg payload and a roughly 2-meter reach, intended for material-handling tasks that exceed the lifting envelope of Borg 01.[3]
The Borg L.01 is an autonomous pallet jack designed to maneuver in tight warehouse spaces. Its public specifications include a load capacity of 2,000 kg, a top speed of 1.7 meters per second, and a compact turning radius of just 1.5 meters. The L.01 was announced for a 2025 launch and is also built in Detroit. A Pro version with omnidirectional wheels has been described in Borg's own materials, aimed at facilities with denser aisle layouts where omnidirectional motion is required.[3][11]
Borg has previewed an autonomous forklift as part of its broader logistics lineup. The forklift is intended to share the same Borg fleet management and autonomy stack as the L.01 pallet jack, allowing the two products to coordinate on pallet flow within a single warehouse. As of late 2025, the forklift remained in pre-launch development.[3]
The company has also disclosed Borg Pods, a patent-filed product designed to integrate humanoid robots into existing work cells without modifying surrounding infrastructure. According to Borg's marketing, Borg Pods can deliver up to a fivefold productivity increase by tightly coupling a humanoid with a customer's existing workstation layout, although these claims have not been independently verified.[6]
Borg Robotics differentiates itself by designing and building most of its key components in-house rather than buying them from external suppliers. Independent coverage has noted that even high-torque actuators, which most humanoid startups source from third parties, are designed and assembled in Detroit by Borg's own engineering team.[5]
Actuator 02 is Borg's second-generation in-house actuator and serves as the joint module for both Borg 01 and the Borg Arm. It is publicly specified at 270 Nm of peak torque in a 1.6 kg package, a torque-to-mass ratio that the company has highlighted as competitive with leading humanoid actuators. Actuator 02 is designed and built in Detroit, which Borg uses as a marketing point in line with its broader American manufacturing positioning.[3][6]
The Orb is Borg's proprietary vision-language-action model (VLA), a class of foundation model for robotics that takes in camera frames and natural-language instructions and outputs motor actions. Borg describes The Orb as the shared intelligence layer across its entire robot ecosystem, meaning that the same underlying model drives Borg 01, the Borg Arm, and the L.01 pallet jack. The use of a single VLA across heterogeneous embodiments is similar in spirit to the multi-embodiment training used in research releases such as OpenVLA and RT-2, although The Orb itself is closed source.[6]
Drawing on The Orb and the surrounding software stack, Borg's robots are designed to:
The company emphasizes practical industrial automation over cutting-edge research demonstrations, focusing on reliability, uptime, and ease of integration into existing manufacturing workflows. Internal demos publicized in 2025 emphasized fully autonomous box handling rather than scripted, teleoperated showcases.[5][8]
The primary target market for Borg Robotics is industrial automation. Specific use cases the company has identified include:
Borg Robotics has stated longer-term goals of expanding into household and caregiving applications, although these remain in the planning stages as of 2025. The company's near-term focus continues to be the industrial market, where regulatory and safety expectations are well-defined and where the labor shortage that Borg cites as its founding rationale is most acute.[1][6]
Borg Robotics operates in an unusually crowded segment of the AI startup landscape. By 2025 the humanoid robotics sector included Tesla's Optimus, Figure AI's Figure 02, Agility Robotics' Digit, Apptronik's Apollo, 1X Technologies' NEO, Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas, and a long list of Chinese competitors led by Unitree and Fourier Intelligence.[2]
Within that field Borg occupies a specific niche:
Industry coverage in 2025 frequently grouped Borg with other rising American humanoid challengers, often noting its small headcount relative to better-capitalized rivals while highlighting its rapid product cadence.[5]