Vibhor Sood is co-founder and vice president of engineering at Burro, where he leads engineering efforts across autonomy, hardware, and fleet infrastructure for robots operating in real-world indoor/outdoor environments. Over the past eight years, Sood has helped scale Burro from an early prototype to a global fleet, shipping over 700 systems and building autonomy that has accumulated over 100 years of continuous operation, covering the equivalent of 9+ laps around the planet, in production settings with over 4,000 end users.
Sood’s work focuses on making AI systems reliable in unstructured, real-world environments. He has led the development of Burro’s core autonomy stack, including computer vision, localization, and navigation, alongside the design of the underlying sensor architecture and computer systems. His approach emphasizes tightly coupled systems, where perception, hardware, and field operations inform each other, enabling continuous improvement through real-world data rather than isolated lab performance. His background spans robotics and electrical engineering, with experience in infrastructure-free outdoor localization research and full-stack system design.
As robots move beyond controlled indoor environments and into agriculture, mining, construction, defense, ports, and critical infrastructure, the engineering challenges become significantly more demanding. Weather, dust, moisture, vibration, uneven terrain, and limited access to maintenance introduce failure modes rarely encountered during lab testing.
Drawing on years of experience supporting autonomous systems in some of the world's harshest environments, this panel will share practical lessons for designing, building, and deploying robots that can withstand real-world field conditions. Attendees will learn best practices for environmental hardening, power architecture, autonomous operations, charging infrastructure, reliability engineering, and long-term fleet maintenance.
Through real-world deployment examples, the session will demonstrate how engineering decisions impact reliability, uptime, operational efficiency, and total cost of ownership. Engineers will leave with practical strategies for building resilient robotic systems that can operate reliably despite exposure to rain, dust, extreme temperatures, vibration, and other environmental challenges.
