The ARM Institute Champion program recognizes ARM Institute Members who have gone above and beyond the call of membership to strengthen US manufacturing through robotics, physical AI, and workforce development while advocating for the ARM Institute’s mission! ARM Champions are recognized annually at a celebratory dinner during our Annual Member Meeting, our premier members-only event that convenes representatives from across our member consortium for three days of networking, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration.
This year, we started monthly highlights of our ARM Institute Champions to connect you better to their work, inspire you on how you might be able to take action on further collaboration with us, and help you meet your fellow Members.
This month’s Champion feature centers on Matthew Brown, CEO of ARM Member Thoughtforge! ThoughtForge got to work immediately when becoming a member of our collaborative consortium by getting involved in ARM Institute-funded projects, presenting at our Annual Member Meeting, and growing Thoughtforge’s network by participating in a variety of ARM Institute member events.
Get to know Matt in the interview below, his advice for new members looking to get more involved, how you can work with ThoughtForge, and more.
Plus – ARM Champion Award nominations are open until June 30 for our 2026 class of Champions! Our 2026 class of Champions will be recognized at our 10th Annual Member Meeting, taking place Nov. 17-19 in Pittsburgh, PA. Learn more and nominate yourself or another ARM Member for recognition here by June 30, 2026.
To start, can you tell us a bit about your background and about ThoughtForge’s work?
I’ve spent more than 25 years building AI for real-world systems where compute is limited, latency is critical, and the environment is unpredictable. I started out working on AI for drone programs at Lockheed Martin and then spent 15 years building real-time AI for games like Halo and Bioshock. I left gaming to help build Bonsai AI, where we built the world’s first production-grade deep reinforcement learning platform before Microsoft acquired us in 2018. That work convinced me the hard problem in robotics isn’t intelligence in the abstract, it’s adaptation and dexterity: handling variation, misalignment, and unexpected contact the way a person would. I started ThoughtForge to solve exactly that. Our software lets industrial robots adapt in real time, on the edge (no GPUs, no massive datasets, no reprogramming for every new task) turning brittle robots into systems that actually hold up in the dynamic, changing world.
How and why did you get involved in the ARM Institute?
The ARM Institute was recommended to us by another founder as a great way to get to know and learn more about the manufacturing problems the government and defense primes are interested in solving.
ThoughtForge joined our consortium and immediately started getting involved in funded projects! Can you tell us about how you get involved so quickly and any advice you have for other ARM Members looking to get more involved?
One of the hardest things to do as a startup is to find the team at an enterprise organization who is interested in and responsible for working with newer technologies and bringing them into their company. This is one of the founding principles of the ARM Institute – the government and primes work together to identify, fund, transition and help commercialize useful, innovative technology. Everyone in the ARM Institute consortium is looking to partner and work together on new technology.
If you’re looking to submit a project the formula is pretty simple: show up, engage, follow up and follow through. The partners who are a fit will engage with you… and in many cases actually find you. It’s really that easy.
The ARM Institute has several key events each year. In our first year we went to the Tech Day & the Annual ARM Member Meeting. Below is what worked for us:
- Tech Day: The purpose of Tech Day is to learn about the upcoming core project call, meet community members and identify potential project partners. When you show up, they give you a list of the attendees there that day and their contact information. During the presentations throughout the day my cofounder, Whitney, looked up the people on the list that she wanted to meet on LinkedIn to look at their photo, then found them in the room and introduced herself. After the event she followed up and, to her surprise, literally everyone she emailed her back. We set up calls and were off to the races.
- ARM Institute Note: Our next Tech Day event (open only to ARM Members) will take place on July 21 at our Pittsburgh headquarters. Learn more here.
- Annual Member Meeting: Before each Member Meeting, ARM sends an email and offers members an opportunity to do a 5 min presentation to the community during the Summit. After presenting, we’ve had multiple community members come find us to express interest in working together.
I wish we could say we had some special hack, but the ARM community and events are designed to help members build relationships and partner on getting valuable technology to market. We recognized this and utilized the opportunities they offered.
Can you tell us about your experience with ARM Institute technology projects and how they’re different from non-ARM Institute-funded projects?
First, you know you’re building something valuable for a group vs. just one customer because a group literally voted on it.
Second, unlike direct customer contracts, your success isn’t kept under lock and key. With the ARM Institute your project and work is shared with the community, if successful, your customer base will grow and compound exponentially: we’re speaking from experience!
2026 will mark the 10th iteration of our Annual Member Meeting, taking place Nov. 17-19 in Pittsburgh as a members-only event. Can you tell us what you look forward to most at this event each year?
What we look forward to most is the community: catching up with our, now, friends, partners and getting to know new members.
What would you like other ARM Members to know about how they can collaborate with ThoughtForge? What’s new at ThoughtForge?
If you’ve got a task that’s been “too hard to automate” (high variability, contact, tight tolerances, or a confined workspace) that’s our wheelhouse. ThoughtForge isn’t a robot company; we make the AI control software that runs on off-the-shelf robots and sensors you already have and lets them adapt in real time. The easiest way to work with us: bring us a hard task and start with a small proof of concept, team up with us on an ARM project call (that’s how most of our funded work has happened), or partner around the technology as a robot OEM, vision provider, or integrator: we’re hardware-agnostic and build on ROS.
What’s new? Right now we’re focused on two areas: working in confined spaces, and insertion tasks like connector mating and related cable and wire-harness manipulation. On the confined-space side, we were awarded a USAF Direct-to-Phase-II SBIR (SLITHER) for autonomous inspection with FLX Solutions, and our ARM-funded FOD FINDER project is in full execution with partners including Northrop Grumman, Siemens, and Airbus. On the insertion side, we’re moving from proof of concepts toward production-grade deployments in connector mating and cable/harness manipulation. Come find us at the next ARM event — a lot of our best work started with exactly this kind of conversation.
Join Matthew & Thousands of Other Experts in Strengthening US Manufacturing
ARM Institute Members lead the way to a future where people and robots work together to respond to our nation’s greatest challenges and to develop and produce the world’s most desired products. By becoming a member of our 500+ member organization consortium, you’ll join thousands of subject matter experts in building the future of US manufacturing through robotics, AI, and workforce innovations. Your membership to our robotics institute unlocks not only access to member-exclusive events and webinars, including our Annual Member Meeting, but also project funding opportunities, project outputs, networking, a digital platform for collaboration, and more.
2026 ARM Institute Member Meeting
Register today for our 10th Annual Member Meeting taking place Nov. 17-19 in Pittsburgh, PA. Our Annual Member Meeting convenes experts from across our consortium for three days of networking, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. This event is open only to ARM Members. Join our consortium to gain access to this unique event.
Thank you to our Platinum Members: GE Vernova, Northrop Grumman, and Siemens, our 10th Anniversary Presenting Sponsors Corsha and the Italian Trade Agency, as well as our event sponsors AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology, fivestar*, GridRaster Inc., ReadyOne Industries, RPI’s Center for Smart Convergent Manufacturing Systems, Tronix3D, and Yaskawa Motoman for supporting our event!
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ABOUT THE ARM INSTITUTE
The ARM (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) Institute is a Manufacturing Innovation Institute (MII) funded by the Office of the Secretary of War under Agreement Number W911NF-17-3-0004 and is part of the Manufacturing USA® network. The ARM Institute leverages a unique and robust 500+ member organizations and partners across industry, academia, and government to make robotics, autonomy, and artificial intelligence more accessible to U.S. manufacturers large and small, train and empower the manufacturing workforce, strengthen our economy and global competitiveness, and elevate national security and resilience. Based in Pittsburgh, PA since 2017, the ARM Institute’s mission is to assert the US as the leading nation in manufacturing output through the adoption of robotics and AI. For more information, visit www.arminstitute.org and follow the ARM Institute on LinkedIn and X.