Matthew Powelson

Matthew Powelson is the Technical Lead for the ARM Institute's Physical AI Initiative, where he leads the development of a modular robotics framework designed to accelerate the adoption of Physical AI in manufacturing. Before joining ARM, he worked on ROS-Industrial surface-finishing systems and was an early contributor to the Tesseract motion planning ecosystem. He later moved into agricultural robotics, helping build and deploy a fleet of 150+ autonomous strawberry-harvesting robots at farms around the world. He brings this end-to-end perspective—from applied R&D to large- scale deployment—to his role advancing Physical AI at ARM.