Realtime Robotics, founded in 2016, is transforming automation with breakthrough motion planning technology. The company’s specialized processor generates safe robot motion plans in microseconds, allowing robots to work collaboratively in dynamic, unstructured environments. Under Peter Howard’s leadership, Realtime has earned 53 patents and 20 invention disclosures, advancing AI-powered solutions that optimize industrial robotics, enable multi-robot coordination, and deliver real-time perception and reaction.
Peter Howard, CEO of Realtime Robotics, brings a lifelong entrepreneurial spirit and decades of global leadership experience to the company’s mission. From launching his first business at age eight to leading startups through market booms, crashes, and global disruptions, Howard has learned the value of transparency and teamwork in overcoming challenges. His people-centered leadership and deep understanding of industry transformation have helped position Realtime Robotics at the forefront of intelligent automation, where innovation, adaptability, and collaboration define both the company’s culture and its success.
1. Career Journey: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
Let me try to answer your question from a different angle. I think that like most people who lead, my leadership approach has been shaped partly by my nature, which is caring, and partly by the places and times I’ve led companies through: Singapore and Japan market upswings, US, EU and China market crashes, 9/11 driven total industry resets, COVID 19 driven bust and boom cycles, and most lately industry-shaking tariff wars. From all of these, I have learned that you get through and thrive by sharing the hurdles and working to fly over them with your team, not by yourself. Transparency makes the scary bearable, and sometimes even exhilarating.
2. Career Path: What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
When I was 8, my father convinced me to start a neighborhood yard-care business. He loaned me $15 to buy a lawnmower, which I had two years to re-pay with 5% interest. He said that I could spend the money that I earned on anything I wanted (which was a dirt bike which I bought when I was 10), and that was enough to get me started in business.
Four startups, two IPOs and two strategic sales later I got a call from the Duke University office of entrepreneurship telling me about an important breakthrough in a core robotics technology, and asking if I could recommend a CEO to drive it. I asked for an overview, and after reading it jumped on a plane to go meet the inventors, and decided to put first funds in and get the company started.
3. Company Differentiation: What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
Most robotics startups of the last 10 years have focused on specific vertical applications, and have built their solutions on the academically created and focused ROS operating system and its associated tools.
The founding team at Realtime Robotics set out to solve some fundamental blockers to widespread robotic adoption related to the complexity of programming robotic systems and the resulting brittleness of these systems when faced with normal product evolution. Instead of creating another bespoke solution, we aimed at automating everything that comes after figuring out what you want your robot to do so robots become the economical go-to solution to labor shortages gripping almost every country in the world now or in the near future.
4. Product Innovation: Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
This past May, we released Resolver, a cloud hosted product that makes even the most complex robotic system a breeze to program and to get optimal performance out of, and powerful enough to adapt production processes to product design changes overnight.
Resolver is helping Automotive OEMs to dramatically shorten their product development and ramp up cycles from five years to less than two years to counter global competition, and is enabling smaller manufacturers with low-volume, high-mix products to introduce robotic automation cost effectively.
5. Success Insight: What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
Well, we learned the hard way that developing an unbelievably amazing breakthrough product is a good starting point, but reaching a tipping point requires that you understand the whole process value chain as it traverses separate companies, and departments within companies. We reached our tipping point this spring when we realized that the companies that helped us perfect Resolver were not the ones going to enjoy its value and in fact had every reason to block its use. When we went to the ones really going to derive benefit, and worked with them to package and price accordingly, we began to feel ‘buckle your seat belts’ acceleration.
6. Challenges and Lessons: Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
We live in interesting times, so challenges come fast and furious. The ones we are experiencing right now with the US administration trying to change American industry, and our actions to adapt and thrive in the choppy, shifting challenges industry is faced with are too fresh to say that we’ve overcome them just yet. However, we have worked to identify industries and companies that are profoundly impacted by tariffs, and focused our powerful new tools on helping them respond far more rapidly than they thought possible, helping them to align manufacturing to balance consumption within national borders and reduce the tariff impacts on their bottom lines.
7. Leadership Impact: In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
Thankfully, I am a leader working among very competent peers. My primary role is to ensure there is enough gas in the tank (or charge in the battery) to get to the promised land. So, I work with the leadership team to get their support in achieving that objective.
But many of our current and potential new investors are current or potential customers, partners, or suppliers, so I work for our CCO helping with customer development, and our VP Product in opening customer and association doors, and our VP Engineering in getting vendor support, and our tiny but incredibly capable Admin team in banking and HR, and we all brainstorm on a regular basis to align on all of these topics.
To learn more about Peter Howard or Realtime Robotics, visit the website here.
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