In this Member Spotlight, mHUB connected with Joe Mullenbach, CEO and Co-Founder of Fluid Reality, to discuss the frontier of robotics.
The world has entered a period of rapid transformation—driven in large part by the rise of artificial intelligence. But while AI is revolutionizing data and decision-making, the next frontier is its integration with the physical world is through robotics. For Joe Mullenbach, co-founder and CEO of Fluid Reality, this fusion of AI and hardware opens the door to something profound: robots acquiring the sense of touch.
“The world has massively changed in just the last few years. With the advent of AI, the scale of the transformation is like on the scale of the Industrial Revolution,” says Mullenbach. “Robotics, bringing that AI to the physical world, is what's next.”
Together with co-founder Craig, Mullenbach has spent years exploring the limitations of current robotics—especially in the realm of haptics, or the science of touch. Today’s advanced robotic systems largely depend on imitation learning and teleoperation, where a human operator controls the robot remotely, seeing what it sees and guiding it accordingly. But there’s a critical element missing in this setup: the ability to feel what the robot is touching.
“Today's leading edge robotics models are about imitation learning... That is done completely without the sense of touch. What we're doing is bringing that sense of touch to the human operators.”
At the core of Fluid Reality’s breakthrough is a deceptively simple yet powerful idea: enabling people to feel virtual objects through high-resolution “bubbles” that create tactile impressions on the skin. “You can think of them like pixels for the sense of touch,” Mullenbach explains. This tactile feedback allows users to perform delicate and complex tasks with robotic systems—tasks that would otherwise require years of training or physical proximity.
But building a hardtech startup—especially one creating something as ambitious as a new form of human-machine interface—comes with formidable challenges.
“The hardest thing when building a hard tech startup is making the transition from demonstrating that you have something really interesting... and getting that to being a mass producible, repeatable product.” That, Mullenbach says, is where mHUB has been instrumental.
Fluid Reality has found in mHUB both the physical tools and the human expertise to grow. “There are two major areas that we really use mHUB. One is for the physical resources, the equipment. The second part is kind of the broader network—access to experts, advice, education.”
Mullenbach is clear: no startup builds success alone. “For us, being part of mHUB is necessary in order to get where we're trying to go.”
The vision behind Fluid Reality is one of democratized robotics—where anyone, regardless of technical background, can interact with and command machines through intuitive, tactile interfaces. “The future that we envision for Fluid Reality is for an individual, someone who is not trained especially in robotics, to be able to sit down with their robot, operate it... and then amplify their own productivity.”
As the robotics revolution accelerates, Fluid Reality stands as a bold example of how we can merge human intuition with machine precision. “This new robotics revolution is gonna reshape everything, and if we're not part of that, we're going to be left behind—not just in the Midwest, but as a country as well.”
And in that future, we won’t just see what machines see—we’ll feel it.
Fluid Reality’s pioneering work in haptics has earned national and international recognition:
-
2024 Fast Company Innovation by Design Honoree — Experimental Design category
-
Best Demo (Jury’s Choice & People’s Choice Honorable Mention) at ACM UIST 2023
-
Best Demo Award at the IEEE World Haptics Conference 2023
-
Featured by Fast Company, Wired, and Popular Science for their revolutionary glove technology
With world-class research and support from mHUB’s hardtech ecosystem, Fluid Reality is poised to bring touch to the digital age—reshaping not just how we use robots, but how we connect with them.
###
If you are a budding entrepreneur looking for a vast community of innovators, take a tour at mHUB to learn more about the hardtech ecosystem and how you can get involved.
