Duane Roberts made millions off a food he was initially wholly ignorant of: the humble burrito.

It was the 1950s, and his family owned a small meat wholesaler called the Butcher Boy that sold patties to local restaurants, including one of the first operating McDonald’s, a location in San Bernardino.

As the fast-food chain and other burger joints grew in popularity, the family brainstormed other products they could manufacture, Roberts recalled in a 2007 interview with the Orange County Register.

A butcher who worked at the company, whom Roberts described as having Hispanic heritage, made a suggestion: “Why don’t you make a burrito?”

“I loved Mexican food, but I had no idea what a burrito was,” Roberts told the Register, saying he was more familiar with enchiladas and tacos.

But the entrepreneurial Roberts went on to turn that seed of an idea into a bean and beef burrito that could be sold frozen and then deep-fried.

Roberts, who would parlay his business success into a prominent role in Inland Empire Republican politics and attain local fame as owner of the historic Mission Inn, died Saturday, according to his family. He was 88.

The story goes that the Riverside businessman experimented in the kitchen for two days straight to get the burrito right. Its sales helped expand the family business from one plant with 60 workers to six plants with 1,400 workers.

Roberts made millions off the product when he sold the company to Central Soya Inc. in 1980. At the time, the company was generating $80 million in annual sales and producing 1 million burritos each day.

His wife, Kelly J. Roberts, said in a statement that her husband was a “visionary entrepreneur, devoted husband, and a man whose heart and generosity forever shaped [their] family and community.” She said he died peacefully in his sleep.

She described Roberts as a “proud American” who served in the United States military and was a “staunch supporter” of the Republican Party.

“[H]e believed passionately in the principles of hard work, perseverance and opportunity, values that guided both his business ventures and his life,” she said.

Roberts hosted a reelection fundraiser for then-President George W. Bush in 2003, and his wife was President Trump’s pick for ambassador to Slovenia during Trump’s first term — although she later pulled herself out of the running, Politico reported.

The businessman, who grew up in Riverside, is also known for saving the historic Mission Inn from the brink of demolition.

The hotel — which hosted both the marriage of the Nixons and the honeymoon of the Reagans — closed for a major overhaul in 1985, but the renovation dragged on, and then the hotel market collapsed. Roberts swept in offering $15.6 million, a steal when compared with the $55 million spent on the renovation, financed by Chemical Bank.

The bank acquiesced, however, fearing more losses. Roberts reopened the Mission Inn in 1992.

“How the Mission Inn was saved is the happy tale of a city’s heart restarted,” former Times reporter Daniel Akst wrote after its reopening. “But it’s also an object lesson in what you can do if you’re solvent — and clever — during the worst recession in Southern California since the 1930s.”

Roberts had a sentimental attachment to the hotel, as his meat company had sometimes entertained clients there. His mother also loved the ornate architecture.

“I like beautiful old things. The Mission Inn is the fabric that binds the community together. It’s a heart-welling thing to own. Some people have sports teams, I have my Mission Inn,” he told the Register in 2007.

Roberts and his wife have been longtime residents of Laguna Beach, but earlier this year they purchased a $48.5-million Palm Beach estate, the latest example of wealthy Californians and Trump fans flocking to Florida.

He is survived by his wife and his stepchildren Doug and Casey.

San Francisco has been mourning the death of KitKat, a beloved corner-store cat who died after being struck by a Waymo robotaxi last week.

KitKat graced the counters of Randa’s Market on 16th Street, near the historic Roxie Theater in the Mission District. KitKat was first introduced on the store’s Instagram page six years ago, quickly winning over the hearts of customers. He wasn’t a surly or suspicious cat — he could be seen playing with someone’s dangling hoodie drawstrings; snoozing in front of shelves with liquor bottles; inside a cardboard box marked with his name; greeting the neighborhood dogs; even dressing up as Santa Claus.

He shot to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year. Not only was he posted on the @bodegacatsofinstagram account (which now has more than 500,000 followers), but he also won a mention in a news story on beloved store cats. “The atmosphere in the store definitely changed after KitKat arrived,” Daniel Zeidan, the store owner’s son, told SFGate. Not only did he get treats from customers, but also “someone recently brought him a blanket so he would stay warm in the winter.”

More recently, he was caught curled up asleep on his own heating pad.

He even made appearances in the next-door bar, Dalva, where his arrival felt like “the president had arrived, making their rounds, shaking hands and charming everyone,” said one mourning Instagram commenter.

But he was fatally wounded around 11:40 p.m. on Oct. 27 just outside the market, Mission Local reported. Two witnesses, speaking anonymously, told the news outlet that they had just left Dalva and saw KitKat sitting in front of a stopped self-driving Waymo for about seven seconds. Then the cat walked under the vehicle, heading toward the sidewalk, as the car pulled away. The right rear tire ran over KitKat, the website said.

“It was an awful sight,” one of the witnesses told Mission Local.

Another person driving by saw the Waymo swerve and told Mission Local he thought the robotaxi was driving faster than he would expect a human would drive on a busy street. “Killed the neighborhoods baby,” a comment on the city’s 311 website said shortly after the collision.

A bartender from another nearby bar, Delirium, rushed KitKat to a veterinarian hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to Mission Local.

The cat was 9 years old, the San Francisco Standard reported.

“We’re heartbroken,” Randa’s Market said on Instagram. “He brought warmth, smiles, and comfort to everyone who walked through our doors…. The store won’t be the same without his little paws padding around.”

One mourner, responding to the post, called KitKat “the best city bodega cat anyone could ever ask for. His lil pet requests meant a lot for some of us passing through, whether we missed our own pet or just wanted to share some love with a neighbor.”

In a statement, Waymo said: “We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away.

“We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him, and we will be making a donation to a local animal rights organization in his honor,” the statement said. “The trust and safety of the communities we serve is our highest priority.”

A Waymo has had a run-in with a pet before. News outlets in 2023 reported on a Waymo striking and killing a small off-leash dog in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood; in that case, a test driver was in the vehicle, but the car was in self-driving mode.

In one close call, a Waymo narrowly avoided running over a runaway dog in Santa Monica in May. An 8-year-old Labrador mix, Trevor, had escaped his owner’s yard and ran into the street in front of a Waymo, which braked suddenly, KCAL-TV reported. The station broadcast video of the near-collision. The dog was uninjured, and his owner praised the car’s quick action.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has received reports of 884 collisions involving autonomous vehicles dating to 2014.

A Waymo robotaxi in downtown Los Angeles in September.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

Waymo, owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet, has been expanding its footprint across California. The robotaxis — electric Jaguar I-Paces — don’t use a human driver and can be hailed on an app in San Francisco and a swath of northern San Mateo County, including Daly City, San Bruno and Burlingame. They’re also available in parts of Silicon Valley and surrounding areas, including Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

In Los Angeles County, Waymos can be hailed across a portion of central L.A., South L.A., and the Westside, including downtown L.A., Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Inglewood.

The self-driving cars are also available in Phoenix.

CHENNAI, India — Now that artificial intelligence has mastered almost everything we do online, it needs help learning how we physically move around in the real world.

A growing global army of trainers is helping it escape our computers and enter our living rooms, offices and factories by teaching it how we move.

In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.

He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI.

He mounts a GoPro camera to his forehead and follows a regimented list of hand movements to capture exact point-of-view footage of how a human folds.

That day, he had to pick up each towel from a basket on the right side of his desk, using only his right hand, shake the towel straight using both hands, then fold it neatly three times. Then he had to put each folded towel in the left corner of the desk.

If it takes more than a minute or he misses any steps, he has to start over.

His firm, a data labeling company called Objectways, sent 200 towel-folding videos to its client in the United States. The company has more than 2,000 employees; about half of them label sensor data from autonomous cars and robotics, and the rest work on generative AI.

Most of them are engineers, and few are well-practiced in folding towels, so they take turns doing the physical labor.

“Sometimes we have to delete nearly 150 or 200 videos because of silly errors in how we’re folding or placing items,” said Kumar, an engineering graduate who has worked at Objectways for six years.

The carefully choreographed movements are to capture all the nuances of what humans do — arm reaching, fingers gripping, fabric sliding — to fold clothes.

The captured videos are then annotated by Kumar and his team. They draw boxes around the different parts of the video, tag the towels, and label whether the arm moved left or right, and classify each gesture.

Kumar and his colleagues in the town of Karur, which is about 300 miles south of Bengaluru, are an unlikely batch of tutors for the next generation of AI-powered robots.

“Companies are building foundation models fit for the physical world,” said Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-founder of Encord, a data management platform in San Francisco that contracts with Objectways to collect human demonstration data. “There’s this huge resurgence in robotics.”

Encord works with robotics companies such as Jeff Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence and Dyna Robotics.

Tesla, Boston Dynamics and Nvidia are among the leaders in the U.S. in the race to develop the next generation of robots. Tesla already uses its Optimus robots — which seem to be often remotely controlled — for different company events. Google has its own AI models for robotics. OpenAI is beefing up its robotics ambitions.

Nvidia projects the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion over the next decade.

There are also many lesser-known companies trying to provide the hardware, software and data to make a mass-produced, multitasking humanoid robot a reality.

Robots are displayed at Nvidia’s booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing in July.

(Mahesh Kumar A. / Associated Press)

Large language models that power chatbots such as ChatGPT have mastered using language, images, music, coding and other skills by hoovering up everything online. They use the entire internet to figure out how things are connected and mimic how we do things, such as answering questions and creating photo-realistic videos.

Data on how the physical world works — how much force is required to fold a napkin, for example — is harder to get and translate into something AI can use.

As robotics improves and combines with AI that knows how to move in the physical world, it could bring more robots into the workplace and the home. While many fear this could lead to job losses and unemployment, optimists think advanced robots would free up humans from tedious work, lower labor costs and eventually give people more time to relax or focus on more interesting and important work.

Many companies have entered the fray as shovel sellers in the AI gold rush, seeing an opportunity to gather data for what is being called physical AI.

One group of companies is teaching AI how to act in the real world by having humans guide robots remotely.

Ali Ansari, founder of San Francisco-based Micro1, said emerging robotics data collection increasingly focuses on teleoperations. Humans with controllers make the robot do something like picking up a cup or making tea. The AI is fed videos of successful and failed attempts at doing something and learns to do it.

The remote-control training can happen in the same room as the robots or with the controller in a different country. Encord’s Hansen said that there are warehouses planned in Eastern Europe where large teams of operators will sit with joysticks, guiding robots across the world.

There are more of these, what some have dubbed “arm farms,” popping up as demand increases, said Mohammad Musa, founder of Deepen AI, a data annotation firm headquartered in California.

“Today, a mix of real and synthetic data is being used, gathered from human demonstrations, teleoperation sessions and staged environments,” he said. “Much of this work still occurs outside the West, but automation and simulation are reducing that dependency over time.”

Some have criticized teleoperated humanoids for being more sizzle than substance. They can be impressive when others are controlling them, but still far from fully autonomous.

Ansari’s Micro1 also does something called human data capture. It pays people to wear smart glasses that capture everyday actions. It is doing this in Brazil, Argentina, India, and the United States.

San José-based Figure AI, partnered with real estate giant Brookfield to capture footage from inside 100,000 homes. It will collect data about human movement to teach humanoid robots how to move in human spaces. The company said it will spend much of the $1 billion it raised to collect first-person human data.

Meta-backed Scale AI, has collected 100,000 hours of similar training footage for robotics through its prototype laboratory set up in San Francisco.

Still, training bots isn’t always easy.

Twenty-year-old Dev Mandal created a company in Bengaluru, hoping to cash in on the need for physical data to train AI. He offered India’s inexpensive labor to capture movements. After advertising his services, he got requests to help train a robotic arm to cook food as well as a robot to plug and unplug cables in data centers.

But he had to give up the business, as potential clients needed the physical movement data collected in a very specific manner, making it tougher for him to make money, even with India’s inexpensive labor. Clients wanted an exact robot arm, for example, using a certain kind of table with purple lights to be used.

“Everything, down to the color of the table, had to be specified by them,” he said. “And they said that this has to be the exact color.”

Still, there’s lots of work for the towel folders of Karur.

Their boss, Objectways founder Ravi Shankar, says that in recent months, his firm has captured and annotated footage of robotic arms folding cardboard boxes and T-shirts and picking out certain colored objects on a table.

It recently started annotating videos from more advanced humanoid robots, helping train them to sort and fold a mix of towels and clothes, folding them and placing them in different corners of the table. His team had to annotate 15,000 videos of the robots doing the jobs.

“Sometimes the robot’s arms throw the clothes and won’t fold properly. Sometimes it scatters the stack,” but the robots are learning quickly said Kavin, 27, an Objectways employee who goes by one name. “In five or 10 years, they’ll be able to do all the jobs and there will be none left for us.”