Mentee Robotics, a stealth startup founded by an experienced team of AI and robotics experts in Israel, made a splash today by unveiling its first bipedal humanoid robot prototype. The company aims to develop household and industrial humanoid robots capable of understanding natural language instructions and learning new tasks through imitation.

At the helm of Mentee Robotics are some heavyweight names in the AI field: Prof. Amnon Shashua, the startup's chairman who is also the founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle technology company Mobileye; Prof. Lior Wolf, Mentee's CEO and former research scientist at Facebook AI Research; and Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a renowned computer scientist and machine learning researcher.

The prototype unveiled by Mentee Robotics demonstrates an end-to-end cycle of complex task completion, including navigation, locomotion, scene understanding, object detection, grasping, and natural language processing powered by large language models (LLMs). However, the company acknowledges that this is not yet a final, production-ready version.

At the core of Mentee's approach is the use of "simulation to reality" (Sim2Real) training, a novel machine learning method that allows reinforcement learning to happen extensively in a virtual environment before transferring the acquired skills to the real robot with minimal additional data needed.

"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. Shashua. "At Mentee Robotics, we see this convergence as the starting point for designing the future general-purpose bipedal 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."

The company joins the likes of Figure AI, Sanctuary AI, Apptronik, Tesla's Optimus, and others in an increasingly heated race to develop advanced humanoid robots. Mentee Robotics is targeting two primary markets initially: household robots adept at tasks like setting tables, cleaning up, handling laundry, and learning new skills through verbal instructions; and industrial warehouse robots capable of locating, retrieving, and transporting items weighing up to 25 kg.

While today's prototype relies solely on vision-based cameras for perception, the company has developed custom-engineered electric motors to enable the required dexterity for its humanoid robot. Mentee Robotics plans to release a production-ready prototype by the first quarter of 2025, bringing its ambitious vision of capable, intelligent humanoid robots one step closer to reality.