Mentee Robotics Unveils MenteeBot: A Humanoid Robot That Integrates AI Across All Operational Layers
April 17 2024 - 7:00AM
Business Wire
- Mentee is developing an end-to-end humanoid robot with
sufficient dexterity for a wide spectrum of activities in both
households and industrial warehouses.
- For the first time, Mentee Robotics demonstrates a complete
end-to-end cycle – from a verbal command to complex task completion
including navigation, locomotion, scene understanding, object
detection and localization, grasping, and natural language
understanding.
- The production-ready prototype expected to be deployed by Q1
2025, will be powered by camera-only sensing, proprietary electric
motors that support unprecedented dexterity, and fully integrated
AI.
The rapid progress in AI enables a new world of automation,
capable of autonomously fulfilling complex tasks in both home and
industrial environments.
Founded in 2022 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, the chairman of
Mentee Robotics, a world-renowned expert in AI, computer vision,
natural language processing and other related fields; Prof. Lior
Wolf, the CEO of Mentee Robotics and formerly a research
scientist and director at Facebook AI Research; and Prof. Shai
Shalev-Shwartz, a world-renowned computer scientist and machine
learning researcher; Mentee Robotics has operated in stealth mode
for the past two years, developing an end-to-end humanoid robot
with sufficient dexterity for a wide spectrum of activities in both
households and industrial warehouses.
The MenteeBot prototype unveiled today integrates AI across all
operational layers. Locomotion is based on a novel Simulator to
Reality (Sim2Real) machine learning approach, wherein reinforcement
learning occurs on a simulated version of the robot – thus
utilizing unlimited data for training, followed by adaptation to
the real world with minimal data requirements. The mapping of the
environment is performed on the fly using NeRF-based algorithms
(the latest neural network-based technologies for representing 3D
scenes). These cognitive maps store semantic information, allowing
the robot to query them to find items and places. The robot
localizes itself in the 3D map and automatically plans dynamic
paths that avoid obstacles.
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for
interpreting commands and “thinking through” the required steps for
completing the task. An emphasis is placed on the ability to
integrate locomotion and dexterity, i.e., dynamically balancing the
robot when carrying weights or reaching out with the hands.
The prototype unveiled today, though not the final version ready
for deployment, demonstrates for the first time a complete
end-to-end cycle from a verbal command to complex task completion
including navigation, locomotion, scene understanding, object
detection and localization, grasping and natural language
understanding.
The production-ready prototype, expected to be deployed by Q1
2025, will be powered by camera-only sensing, proprietary electric
motors that support unprecedented dexterity, and fully integrated
AI. This AI enables complex reasoning for task completion,
conversation, and on-the-fly learning of new tasks.
“We are on the cusp of a convergence of computer vision, natural
language understanding, strong and detailed simulators, and
methodologies on and for transferring from simulation to the real
world,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, chairman of Mentee
Robotics. “At Mentee Robotics we see this convergence as the
starting point for designing the future general-purpose bi-pedal
robot that can move everywhere (as a human) with the brains to
perform household tasks and learn through imitation tasks it was
not previously trained for.”
About Mentee Robotics
Mentee Robotics is the creator of MenteeBot, a personalized
humanoid robot that integrates AI across all operational layers.
Mentee was founded in 2022 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, the chairman of
Mentee Robotics, a world-renowned expert in AI, computer vision,
natural language processing and other related fields; Prof. Lior
Wolf, the CEO of Mentee Robotics and formerly a research scientist
and director at Facebook AI Research; and Prof. Shai
Shalev-Shwartz, a world-renowned computer scientist and machine
learning researcher.
Mentee Robotics' mission is to fully integrate robotics,
sensing, and AI into a humanoid robot with human-like dexterity and
perception, that can be personalized and adjusted to different
environments and tasks using natural human interaction. Mentee
solutions aim to enhance productivity and daily operations for both
households and warehouses, resulting in improved efficiency and
overall well-being in these two distinct settings. So far, Mentee
Robotics has raised $17M from Ahren Innovation Capital and
additional investors. Learn more at www.menteebot.com.
Videos: End-to-end demonstration Hand dexterity Walking with
weights Agile movement
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