Pittsburgh is building an embodied future

Nearly half a century after the collapse of Pittsburgh’s steel industry, Pennsylvania’s second-largest city has modified itself into an embodied tech hub building physical robotics and the software that makes it swing. The aptly labeled Robotics Row, a two-mile-long corridor spanning from downtown Pittsburgh into the historic Lawrenceville neighborhood, is home to many of the city’s more than 80 robotics companies. Robotics startups join Silicon Valley powerhouses with local offices like Uber and Meta, putting the Steel City’s density of robotics companies above East Coast tech nucleus and fellow innovator Boston. 

In 2019, local nonprofit Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC) erected a 265,000-square-foot industrial robotics complex that makes the industry’s transition tangible. Nestled within a meander along the Monongahela River in the city’s Hazelwood neighborhood, Mill 19 is a manufacturing research center built within the exoskeleton of a former steel mill — a structure that tells the story of past and present at once. The weathered steel frame hugs a modern blue and yellow building, which houses tenants like Carnegie Mellon University’s Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute and Catalyst Connection’s Manufacturing Innovation Center for workforce training. 

Just across the green is CMU’s new Robotics Innovation Center at the technology-dense Hazelwood Green — an area that’s a microcosm of a much broader trajectory for Pittsburgh. From the outside, the city is an unsuspecting tech hub with a notable focus on the built world, but robotics in southwestern Pennsylvania now spans industrial automation, autonomous mobility, defense and aerospace, health care, agriculture, computer vision, retail, and more.

Pittsburgh’s robotics story is a present-day continuation of its long-standing relationship with industrialism. And its increasingly significant role in robotics has been percolating for decades. In 1979, robotics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — including Red Whittaker, who would later co-found space tech company Astrobotic alongside John Thornton — applied early self-driving technology to cleanup efforts after the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Later that year, CMU’s Robotics Institute within the School of Computer Science became the world’s first academic department devoted entirely to robotics. In 1988, the university launched the world’s first robotics doctorate program. 

“We needed that [steel industry] base, and we’re not moving past it. We’re expanding,” said Alivia Chapla, director of marketing and communications at Astrobotic, which is situated roughly two blocks from the Steelers’ Acrisure Stadium. Astrobotic builds lunar landers and rovers for NASA and other governmental and commercial customers. With more than $600 million in contracts since its founding in 2007 and a 47,000-square-foot local facility — plus a seven-acre reusable rocket testing site in Mojave, California — the company has given Pittsburgh its own downtown mission control. 

Astrobotic’s current status as a thriving company with more than 230 employees far exceeds its humble origins as a CMU spinoff born in a small office above a bagel shop. The company was the first commercial vendor to launch a mission to the moon as part of a new NASA program, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, in 2024. Chapla says its upcoming lunar landing mission, Griffin, is poised to launch in the second half of 2026. 

Perhaps the most celebrated of Pittsburgh’s robotics darlings is Gecko Robotics, which reached unicorn status with a $1.25 billion valuation in June 2025 by making robots that inspect and improve critical infrastructure like bridges and oil refineries. Even the recently renovated Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) embodies the robotics identity. xBridge, a tech innovation center located at PIT, is working on innovations like robotic baggage handling and autonomous mobility to help disabled passengers get through the airport.

Another CMU spinoff is HEBI Robotics, which a group of students and faculty founded in 2014. Now located in the city’s Polish Hill neighborhood, HEBI has a compact team of under 20 people, building custom robots out of software-driven actuators (what CEO Bob Raida calls “Legos for robots”). Rather than sticking to a certain model, HEBI’s engineers take a problem and build a form-fitting solution. That way, “the robot can suit the application or the workspace, rather than having to change the workspace,” said Raida. For example, one of their robots, Treadward, is built for rugged fieldwork. It’s equipped with a core sampling device and can navigate waterlogged infrastructure, disaster zones, and construction sites.

HEBI says its customers and collaborators range from Chevron and Siemens to NASA and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Their actuators are used to teach robotics at Caltech and support research at Google DeepMind. HEBI is also developing robots for NASA to build and maintain modular structures in space, and it previously brought to market a spider-like hexapod named Daisy to navigate uneven terrain while carrying heavy payloads.

“A lot of the industrial applications we work on today are robots that get tools and sensors into difficult-to-reach or dangerous workspaces,” said Raida, pointing out a furnace-cleaning robot they developed that keeps a worker in control of the robot without exposing themselves to harsh pollutants.

“This is a region where making things still matters,” said CMU president Farnam Jahanian during an event at the Robotics Innovation Center in late April. “Powering the Future of Sport,” held during the 2026 NFL Draft Week, which took place in Pittsburgh, showcased innovations like the homegrown YinzCam and CMU MetaMobility Lab’s wearable exoskeleton to visiting investors, founders, and NFL executives. The event also hosted a $1.75 million pitch competition backed in part by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who made verbal commitments to multiple Pittsburgh tech startups during the competition.

Cuban, a product of Pittsburgh himself, left the city in the early 1980s. At the time, the area’s unemployment rate exceeded 18%, per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a result of the deindustrialization crisis that saw the closure of steel industry giants like Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, and Homestead Steel Works. Now, it seems opportunity has returned en masse to the city, which boasts a 3.5% unemployment rate that’s lower than both the state and national average. “Deep tech” companies contribute more than 3,800 jobs in the city of Pittsburgh and nearly 7,500 jobs in Southwestern Pennsylvania, according to the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. Greater Pittsburgh boasts more than 130 robotics companies within 150 miles of the city, with most of those existing within city delineations. 

“Pittsburgh, after Silicon Valley, is becoming the leading center for artificial intelligence and robotics,” Cuban said on the Future of Sport stage. “I think that really sets Pittsburgh up to continue to grow and amaze people.”

Many of Pittsburgh’s present-day robotics figures are locals who left then returned. Chapla, from Astrobotic, left Pittsburgh as a teenager with her family but found her way back because she loved the city. Raida, from HEBI, grew up in the city in the ’70s. “I remember how bleak it was,” he said. He left in the ’90s but returned to get his MBA from CMU around the time HEBI’s founding engineers were getting their wheels. “It’s especially gratifying for me as a lifelong Pittsburgher to see and contribute to that transition into a technology hub,” said Raida.

The region’s robotics growth is part of a larger concerted effort to bolster the city’s — and the state’s — economy. In 2022, the New Economy Collaborative of Southwestern PA received a $62.7 million grant from the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge to use towards establishing Pittsburgh as a globally recognized robotics and autonomy leader. And in 2024, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro launched a 10-year strategic plan to develop key industries, including robotics and technology.

That plan is “not on the shelf,” said Rick Siger, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, as he pulled out a copy of the nearly 50-page strategic plan from his briefcase. In part, the plan aims to bring Pittsburgh’s strengths statewide. “The core capability that Carnegie Mellon has been building since it began its robotics program has created an ecosystem of talent, companies, research, and capability here that’s unique among mid-sized cities,” he said. “We’ve got to bring the right training capabilities to bear so that people anywhere in Pennsylvania can participate in this economy.”

Beyond space to innovate, talent development is just as crucial, and it goes beyond academic hubs like CMU, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University. Community College of Allegheny County and Allison Park vocational high school A.W. Beattie Career Center each have dedicated robotics pathways. For the younger learners, former Steelers running back and NFL Hall of Famer Jerome Bettis is expanding his CyberBus initiative, which brings mobile classrooms equipped with computers, robotics kits, and specialized instructors to under-resourced after-school programs and community centers around the city.

With all these pipelines in place, Pittsburgh has the ingredients for an even more influential future. Perhaps that future is one where people are more inclined to relocate to the region. 

“It’s sometimes hard to get people to come here from out of state,” said Chapla. “They think, if I’m committed to one company and the worst happens, how am I going to stay?” 

But once people make it to Pittsburgh’s tech scene, it’s often for good. Matt Smith, chief growth officer at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, said the region’s workforce is particularly “sticky.” He added, “That’s a unique part of the value proposition [for founders]. Companies don’t have to go out and turn their workforce over as frequently as they do in other markets.”

And spirits are high. For a place focused on the nuts and bolts of corporeal innovation — a venture requiring some serious organization and logistics — Pittsburgh’s engineers make a seemingly concerted effort to find the whimsy in their work. Case in point: At “Powering the Future of Sport,” the demo room simultaneously showcased a waddling robotic penguin and underwater infrastructure inspectors, a football-throwing robot and a language-guided arm that can perform surgery.It’s another echo of the unpretentious attitude that built, and continues to build, Pittsburgh. 

“It’s a tough business,” said Raida. “If you’re working in robotics and you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”

In that outlook, hard work coexists with Pittsburghers’ willingness to play, to imagine, and to bring to fruition a future that works in their favor.