About Rose City Robotics
Our Mission
Make battery disassembly safe, scalable, and worth doing.
Rose City Robotics is a battery recycling research company in Portland, Oregon. By 2040 the world will discard roughly 20 million tons of EV batteries a year. Most still hold about 80% of their capacity. We build robotic systems that take packs apart instead of shredding them — recovering modules and cells for second life, producing cleaner feedstock for recyclers, and keeping people out of the hazard zone.
In 2026 the U.S. Department of Energy named us a winner of the Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Prize Breakthrough Contest.
Our Team
We're engineers and operators who take batteries apart for a living — supported by research partners at Portland State University and evaluation partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Duncan Miller, MBA
Co-founder, Operations / Business Development
Duncan is a software engineer with over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur. He is a FIRST Robotics coach and has a passion for technology and entrepreneurship. Duncan earned an MBA from Babson College and is a mentor and innovation competition judge at the PSU Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Accelerator.
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Aaryn Curl
Senior Program Manager Robotics & AI
Aaryn is a lifelong engineer with 19 years at Intel, where she led cross-functional software programs from concept to launch. At RCR, she combines her technical experience and passion to enable our customers to get the most out of their software and hardware investments.
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Kaj Hansteen Izora
Associate Physical AI Engineer
Kaj (pronounced like Kai) is an engineer in AI, ML, and robotics, specializing in simulation, interpretability, and applying novel statistical methods to machine learning. He is an expert in utilizing tools like Omniverse and Cosmos to build realistic simulations of physical systems.
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Samantha Town
Marketing and Communications
Sam helps shape our communication and operational strategies with a conscientious emphasis on human relationships and impact. Sam graduated from the University of Oregon and grew up working in a family business in Oregon wine country.
Our Advisory Board
Our advisors bring deep experience in robotics, manufacturing, and data science, and help us navigate technical direction, partnerships, and deployment.
Our Values
We believe battery research should be honest about what it can do, grounded in peer-reviewed science, and built to keep people safe.
- Safety
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No person belongs next to a pack in thermal runaway. We design the human out of the hazard zone first, and optimize everything else second.
- Science
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We publish what we learn, build on peer-reviewed research, and validate with national laboratory partners. Claims on this site trace back to our DOE prize application.
- Circularity
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A battery that still holds 80% of its capacity isn't waste. We recover modules, cells, and components for second life before anything is recycled — and what is recycled arrives as cleaner feedstock.
Our Company
Battery recycling research, based in Portland, Oregon.
Rose City Robotics is an Oregon corporation based in Portland. Our disassembly research combines teleoperated robotics with transformer-based imitation learning, developed with partners including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Portland State University, Loupe Robotics, and Polaris Battery Labs.
