FORT Robotics announced the acquisition of Mapless AI, a Boston and Pittsburgh-based company specializing in vehicle teleoperation and autonomy supervision. The deal expands FORT’s Trust Platform by adding remote human-in-the-loop teleoperation and onboard active safety capabilities, positioning the company to support supervised autonomy across a range of industrial and commercial applications.
FORT said the acquisition broadens its platform from safety-certified machine control to a more comprehensive architecture for supervised autonomy. The company believes these capabilities will help address growing demand for trusted autonomous systems operating in real-world environments where human oversight and proactive safety measures remain essential.
The acquisition introduces two major technology capabilities to the FORT platform:
- Remote teleoperation, enabling off-site specialists to monitor and operate vehicles or machine systems across long distances while maintaining human oversight.
- Onboard active safety through environmental sensing technology, allowing machines to detect, anticipate, and respond to changing conditions in real time.
According to FORT, combining these technologies creates a proactive safety framework that enables autonomous machines to interpret their surroundings, anticipate hazards, and make real-time operational decisions while allowing a single remote operator to supervise multiple vehicles.
The acquisition also brings Mapless AI’s engineering team to FORT. The company noted that the team, led by founders Philipp Robbel, PhD, and Jeffrey Kane Johnson, PhD, has experience at organizations including Bosch, Apple, Uber, Aptiv, and nuTonomy. FORT believes this expertise will help accelerate development of supervised autonomy solutions for industries such as construction, logistics, defense, and last-mile delivery.
Founded in 2018, FORT Robotics provides distributed control technology designed to enable safe human-machine collaboration. The company says it has secured 27 patents and deployed more than 19,000 units to more than 600 customers globally, serving organizations in agriculture, construction, warehousing, and defense.
KEY QUOTES:
“The Physical AI market is a multi-billion-dollar economic engine, but its full potential can only be unlocked if machines are trustworthy enough to operate in real-world human environments. The robotics industry is at a critical crossroads where impressive demos are everywhere, but scalability remains rare. Acquiring Mapless AI expands our platform to directly meet this vital need, allowing FORT to deliver the proactive safety frameworks our customers are asking for. We are building the foundational trust system to ensure that as robots become more autonomous, safety is an accelerator rather than a bottleneck.”
Samuel Reeves, CEO, FORT Robotics
“We founded Mapless to build the core safety layer robots need to operate effectively in complex, real-world environments. The reality is that for robots to work closely with humans and valuable infrastructure, they must be smart enough to understand and anticipate risk. Joining the FORT family allows us to bring our safety-first vision to a much larger platform, accelerating the type of products that will define the next decade of industrial automation and physical AI.”
Philipp Robbel, Co-Founder, Mapless AI
