OLO: the Sheffield startup teaching everyone to speak robot

Chaired by Liz Upton, co-founder of Raspberry Pi, OLO has just completed its commercial launch alongside a clutch of international partners. At the 2026 Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard, the company is showing off its most ambitious public demonstrations yet, including a robot arm that visitors to FOS Future Lab presented by Randox can instruct out loud.

The skills shortage that isn’t

“The industry has spent a decade talking about a skills shortage as if the only answer is to train more roboticists,” says co-founder and CEO Nick Thompson. “What we see is a different picture: the expertise is already inside warehouses, factories and labs, but the infrastructure was never built for those teams.”

In other words, many of us know what we want robots to do, but don’t know how to tell them. Existing coding tools were designed for an increasingly rare band of expert roboticists, and it’s causing a progression bottleneck.

OLO is built on ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2), the open-source framework that has become the industry standard. It’s compatible with thousands of existing robots and drivers but is famously tough to master  

OLO sits on top of ROS2 and hides the hardest parts. Users describe robot behaviours in plain English, and AI-assisted tooling turns those descriptions into production-grade code in JavaScript or Python. Register an email address and within minutes you can be running a simulated robot.

You can even start programming against a simulated machine in the cloud before any hardware ships, then move the same code straight onto the physical robot when it arrives.

The Raspberry Pi of robotics

It is not lost on anyone at OLO that company chair Liz Upton has helped pull off this kind of tech democratisation before. Raspberry Pi turned a £25 computer into a tool used everywhere from classrooms to Heathrow’s flight displays, shipping more than 80 million units before its 2024 London Stock Exchange listing.

“In terms of success, absolutely,” says OLO co-founder and COO, Eleanor Tang-Smith, when asked whether the startup wants to be the Raspberry Pi of robotics. “Who wouldn’t want to be one of the most successful computer companies in the UK?

“Raspberry Pi opened up the world of developing on small computers to a much wider audience, and it was a hit. Similarly, that’s what we’re trying to do in robotics. There’s all this amazing hardware and really great software — let’s get people looking at it, using it and make it easy. Even people who don’t code can have a go and understand it.”

With the global robot software market projected to grow from $24.3 billion in 2025 to $185.2 billion by 2035, according to Global Market Insights, it’s a timely ambition.

Not the ChatGPT of robots

OLO does use AI to help generate code under the hood. The difference from a chatbot or an agent-style system — where you give a command and it acts in a black box — is that OLO’s AI writes real, readable code in JavaScript or Python. That code stays visible to the user, who can read it, check it and change it, so you always know exactly what the robot is doing and why.

The platform, Tang-Smith says, helps you close the gap “between ‘that’s cool, I have a robot that can dance’ and ‘how do I get it to wash dishes?’” The honest answer is you start with one dish and build from there, because useful things take time, however convincing the viral clips look.

What you’ll find at FOS Future Lab

OLO will run a stable of robots live at FOS Future Lab, including a wheeled rover, a six-wheeled mobile platform, a four-legged quadruped and an industrial robot arm, all driven directly by the platform. A Unitree G1 humanoid and a second quadruped will also join the line-up.

FOS Future Lab visitors will be able to plot robotic paths and navigate around obstacles, including playing a game of pick-and-place, directing a mechanoid arm to move coloured blocks with plain English commands. A vision system reads the scene, OLO turns the instruction into real, readable code, and the arm does the rest.

It sounds modest until you remember picking the right thing up and putting it in the right place is the foundation of almost every useful robot job, from sorting parcels to packing pharmaceuticals.

Despite working with various robot manufacturers, OLO's real target is people who assumed robotics was never for them. Tang-Smith, who admits to never writing a line of code in her life, says bringing people along for the journey, not just shipping the technology, is the message it wants younger FOS Future Lab visitors to take away.

Randox is a global leader in diagnostics, revolutionising patient outcomes through innovative technologies, including its patented biochip technology. This pioneering diagnostic platform allows for the simultaneous detection of multiple biomarkers from a single sample, delivering faster, more accurate, and comprehensive results. Operating in over 145 countries, Randox develops advanced laboratory instruments, high-quality reagents, and innovative testing solutions to improve global healthcare.

Randox Health brings this cutting-edge technology directly to individuals, offering bespoke, preventative health testing programs. With world-class laboratories and personalised health insights, Randox Health enables early detection of a wide range of conditions, helping individuals take control of their health.

Together, Randox and Randox Health are redefining diagnostics and preventative healthcare. For more information, visit www.randox.com and www.randoxhealth.com.

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