McKenzie Automation is how the organization turns real work into robot capability — an eight-step framework for capturing what skilled people do, decomposing it into reusable instructions, testing it with humans before hardware, and automating it under natural-language control with guardrails.
We don't start from a spec — we start from a person doing the job. Each step converts tacit human skill into something a robot can execute and reason about, and every failure feeds an agile loop that improves the next pass.
Bodycam and hand-level video of a skilled field worker doing the job naturally. Long shifts are broken into short, labelled task chunks.
Review footage, timestamp the key moments, and translate actions into instruction calls — surfacing the tacit moves that are hard to describe.
Hand a second person only the instructions. If they can reproduce the task, the decomposition is working. If not, the instructions get sharper.
Run the same instructions while a human pilots the physical robot — changing one variable at a time to validate the hardware and the workflow together.
Automate reusable action verbs — grasp, place, press, open — and pair each with object metadata such as cup, handle, tray, or bag.
Orchestrate the skill library with conditional logic and staged autonomy so the robot can run the full workflow: detect, pick, place, verify.
Convert the desired end state into formal, symbolic goals, then use inference and common-sense reasoning to plan the actions safely.
A person states the goal in plain language. The system parses it, builds a plan, checks safety constraints and consequences, then executes on the robot.
Feedback → agile pipeline → improvements → retest. The loop is the product.
Most work compresses into a small set of repeatable instructions.
Instruction frequency follows a power law.
Object context matters as much as the action itself.
Failures feed an agile improvement loop.
Repeated execution creates a virtuous cycle of automation.
McKenzie Automation is the methodology behind McKenzie Robotics' humanoid and industrial platforms — machines built to take on work that is dull, dirty, or dangerous, operating alongside people in the real world.
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