When Tristan Fogt created a virtual “boxing dummy” as an undergraduate, he never thought that experiment would lead to a career helping industrial workers avoid serious injuries. But as cofounder of Sensory Robotics, Fogt helped create software—dubbed “SR-1”—that can control a robotic arm and detect if it’s about to contact something.
Integrating the company’s SR-1 sensing tech into a robot enables the machine to do its automated job without smacking into a nearby human.
Named to the 2026 Forbes “30 Under 30” list, Fogt has focused on developing robots that are not only efficient but also safe. Although industrial manufacturing and safety can be seen as a “musty area of engineering,” he says, he finds it immensely fulfilling.
“To be part of something that can help people, I see that as really gratifying,” says Berlin-based Fogt. Sensory Robotics’ main team works out of Cincinnati, Ohio.
A robot is surrounded by 3-D cameras to monitor safety zones in real-time, creating an invisible bubble around the machinery. When something or someone enters that bubble, the robot automatically stops working. When it detects that entity leaving the area, the robot starts back up.
“We are leaning into the idea that you can have people in the same workspace as a robot without the situation being dangerous,” Fogt says.
Boxing and Swords
At Dartmouth, Fogt could often be found in Thayer’s prototyping lab, taking advantage of the lathe, soldering station, computer-controlled machines, and other resources he didn’t have growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. “That lab inspired me to come to Dartmouth when I first saw it on a tour,” recalls Fogt. “Back home, we just had a garage with really old tools.”
Eager to code since he was a teen and a longtime STEM zealot, Fogt felt liberated to use Thayer’s tools whenever he wanted. “I was able to build what I wanted, mess up, and learn from my mistakes,” he says.
One particularly impressive stint of tinkering in the lab led Fogt to develop robots. He created a virtual reality (VR) tool that allowed a user to box with a simulated opponent and prompt a robot dummy to react. In Fogt’s system, the robot opponent moved left or right based on where the boxer struck its virtual twin in the game.
“If you squint, you can see the burgeoning technology there that would become SR-1,” Fogt says. Like his boxing program, Sensory Robotics builds a virtual twin of a workspace surrounded with 3-D sensors.
When Fogt posted his virtual boxing demo on the social networking platform Reddit, he quickly received a message from someone who had created a similar software program. He chatted in person with Chris Edwards and learned the Northern Kentucky University graduate had developed a VR sword-fighting game in which a real robot battled a user. It was designed so the robot wouldn’t hit the person, just the sword.
“We thought our ideas were cool, but they didn’t have a market, because who would buy this bulky dummy or robot for boxing?” says Fogt.
Instead, by 2018, Fogt and Edwards decided to form a company riffing off their ideas with a twist: bring the idea of a virtual twin to industrial safety and collaboration with human workers.
At first, Fogt wondered if industrial safety was open to new ideas, since it didn’t attract “the kind of Stanford graduates who wanted to end up working on something big such as electric vehicles.” That lack of innovation made the sector even more attractive to the pair. “Industrial safety was ripe and wide open to us,” Fogt says.
A Bubble with Safety Zones
The standard approach to employees working alongside robots has not worked effectively, according to Fogt. Infrared light beams from sensors can detect if there is movement in an area where there shouldn’t be, such as when a robot arm is careening toward a human head. But sensors are poor at predicting what will happen if a hand suddenly moves into a dangerous area.
His approach to mapping the workspace as a bubble with safety zones eliminates the infrared-focused technology of yesteryear, Fogt says.
Coding the back end of SR-1 took months and navigating the red tape to meet safety standards was a bureaucratic nightmare, but when SR-1 launched, Fogt felt he was part of something bigger than a robotic arm. He realized that Sensory Robotics was leading a new approach to human-worker safety.
“The old way had a lot of blind spots, as it didn’t capture the 360-degree area of a workspace,” Fogt says. “We wanted to address a problem that hadn’t been answered.”
Their clients include auto manufacturers and research groups such as the National Institute for Aviation Research’s automation research center at Wichita State University, which often collaborates with businesses to develop and blueprint innovations. SR-1 has been vital for helping manufacture parts for Spirit AeroSystems, says program lead Nicolette Blasgen.
“There is a push for companies to implement higher safety standards on the industrial robotics side of things,” she says, “and we haven’t seen anything like what Sensory Robotics is doing.”
She adds that stronger safety standards for how humans work with robotics lead to greater productivity. “Workers don’t need to restart a robot when it comes in close contact with a human, which is how it used to be, as the SR-1 will restart automatically once the human is out of harm’s way,” Blasgen says.
In September 2025, Sensory Robotics made headlines when it secured a $1.25-million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to upgrade robotics technologies in mobile systems used by Air Force hangars.
“We want to facilitate human-robot cooperation in autonomous, dynamic production environments such as these areas,” says Fogt, “and our work is important because we allow employees to safely use this unique manufacturing strategy.”
Up next for Sensory Robotics is SR-2, which will incorporate embedded sensors instead of needing sensors placed around the work area. “In the end,” Fogt says, “we want to develop something that has the power and speed of an industrial robot with a higher level of safety than what we see today.”
David Silverberg, a Toronto-based writer who covers business and agriculture, is a frequent DAM contributor.
