Minerva Humanoids
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2020
- Tweets27
- Following107
- Followers188
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Sandor Felber retweeted
Some jobs shouldn't have a human in them at all! ⚠️
I visited @mnv_humanoids in Stuttgart, who are building humanoids for hazardous industrial and public safety work.
Yesterday they came out of stealth with a ~$10M pre-seed round led by @generalcatalyst, with @LongJourneyVC and @CredoVentures as co-leads.
The founders know the category well. CEO @SandorFelber helped launch MIT CSAIL humanoid research line and worked on Tesla Optimus. CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as one of the technical leads on Stretch. Together they went from an idea to a walking humanoid in five months.
Yeah, in 5 months!!! 🤯
One of their examples is the render-safe procedure on an unknown drone at an airport.
Today that means a human in a bomb suit walking toward an object nobody has identified yet. Minerva says their robot, Roger, completes the procedure much faster than any existing method.
For a warehouse you can redesign the building around the robot, and plenty of companies do exactly that. A refinery cannot be redesigned. Neither can an offshore platform or an airport apron. The ladders, stairs, hatches, valve wheels and hand tools are already there, built around the human body, and retrofitting them costs more than the automation. So the robot fits the environment instead.
The control architecture splits the work between human and AI. An operator works from a safe distance, potentially from home, while Minerva Intelligence handles balance, locomotion and manipulation assistance underneath. The human keeps the judgement and the domain expertise, but the robot takes the risk.
And every session an operator runs generates training data, so the AI can support them more reliably over time and gradually take on more of the task.
→ Hardware built in Germany, AI and software developed in the Bay Area
→ Teleoperation now, with autonomy increasing as the data accumulates
→ First paid pilots start this fall
Put the machine in danger, not the person. That's the whole product.
What a time to be a robotics guy these days! 😮💨
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Sandor Felber retweeted
Our entire society relies on human sacrifice, and we take it completely for granted.
The fuel that got you to work. The power charging the screen you're reading this on. The comfortable temperature in your office today.
Behind all of it are unsung heroes who risk their lives every shift so the rest of us never have to think about it.
They fly out to a freezing oil rig 100 miles out in the North Sea and turn a valve that may or may not have scalding gas behind it.
Every year, over 7,000 people die in hazardous energy operations alone, and many more in jobs that are incredibly dangerous but too important not to do.
But you mean to tell me the entire humanoid industry is RACING to fold laundry and load dishwashers? Are we serious?
Minerva is building humanoids for the world's most dangerous jobs. Explosive atmospheres, arctic weather, toxic leaks, biohazards.
So instead of sending a human, we can send Roger.
Proud believer in @SandorFelber and @moribots since T-1.
Why die when they can’t?
We're out with Roger.
We started Minerva because the people who keep our lights on and our airports safe still risk their lives.
Roger goes in. The experts stay safe and in control.
From an idea to walking humanoid in five months.
Proud of this team.
We're hiring!
Sandor Felber retweeted
At Vmax, we are automating the construction of RL environments and the post-training of agents. We are hiring members of technical staff and research fellows. Come join us in SF! (link to apply in comments).
We are getting humanoid robots to do real physical work - not demos - and are looking to meet people in robotics & reinforcement learning!
If you’ve shipped robots and know your way around reinforcement learning (locomotion or manipulation), teleoperation, VR, sim-to-real, safety, and latency - message me 5-10 lines about your background and a link to your portfolio/website/GitHub/repo if interested.
Sandor Felber retweeted
Introducing Bunny - world's first curiosity device for kids
It’s screenfree..it’s portable..
We raised $1M from @spc to reimagine how kids thrive in the age of AI, safely.
Comment 'Bunny'. Our nephew will pick 50 families that get it for free this holiday season…
Happy to share my O1 application has been approved earlier this summer - shout out to @lisawehden and the amazing @plymouthstreet for compiling a solid application for me so quickly!
Excited to get back to building @NyroHumanoids at @spc in San Francisco!
Sandor Felber retweeted
One week remaining to apply for the Founder Fellowship @spc
Here's why it's the best way to start a venture scale company
Sandor Felber retweeted
What is it like to build humanoid robots, as a software engineer? Today's deepdive goes into the software side of this industry - but before we do, we need to talk about hardware. With Sandor Felber, formerly Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
Sandor Felber retweeted
Catch @nolan_fey's oral/poster at today's ICLR Robot Learning Workshop!
robot-learning.ml/2025/
The paper will also appear at RSS.
Excited to share my recent work with @gabe_mrgl , Martin Pettico, and @pulkitology . We’re pushing the limits of whole-body control to make robots faster, stronger, and more athletic!
Sandor Felber retweeted
1/ Peter Thiel famously said, "We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters instead."
I've always wondered: why? Why wouldn't we build flying cars in Silicon Valley?
There are lots of reasons...but I think the simple one is:
Hardware is slow 👇
Sandor Felber retweeted
Casting reward selection as a model selection leads up to 8x faster learning and 50% better performance! (arxiv.org/abs/2410.13837)
⚡ Provable regret guarantees.
🌟 Easy to implement (github.com/Improbable-AI/ors…).
⚔️ 1 GPU can do the work of up to 8 GPUs!
Presenting ORSO: Accelerating Reward Design via Online Reward Selection and Policy Optimization to be presented at @iclr_conf 2025.
Designing and selecting reward functions is one of the most challenging problems in building AI agents. ORSO accelerates progress in building performant AI agents.
Joint work with @calvincbzhang @ZhangWeiHong9 and @aldopacchiano
Sandor Felber retweeted
Excited to share my recent work with @gabe_mrgl , Martin Pettico, and @pulkitology . We’re pushing the limits of whole-body control to make robots faster, stronger, and more athletic!