Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
Hacker News Salem_robotics
Salem Robotics launched a product that adds task-specific software intelligence to existing mobile robots for hazardous industrial survey and inspection workflows. It offers paid technical validations ranging from tens of thousands up to over $100k, then ongoing deployments from the low hundreds of thousands to about $500k per robot. The company’s approach changes inspection automation by combining AI for semantic/scene understanding with classical constrained geometry planning and joint-level control, plus a feedback loop tied to inspection results.
Why it matters
Hi HN, we're the founders of Salem Robotics (https://salemroboticsinc.com). We give existing mobile robots the task-specific intelligence to carry out surveys and physically interactive inspections in hazardous industrial facilities.Here's a video of it running on real robot hardware with a few words from us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_228h3NE7cWe came to Salem through robotics research at UT Austin and a combined 15 years working in nuclear, including about 10 years developing and deploying autonomous robots at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Over the last five years, we kept running into the same gap: robot hardware had become very capable, but making a robot carry out a complete industrial procedure still required a surprising amount of robotics work and manual intervention.The part that interested us most was manipulation. A nuclear contamination survey, for example, can require taking a "smear": wiping a defined area of a surface so it can be checked for removable radioacti
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