It seems that the new start-up company of Prof. Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye and his partners Prof. Shai Shalov Schwartz and Prof. Lior Wolff has revealed its development, ahead of the giant corporations that have been working for years on the development of humanoid robots. The Israeli company states that the robot will be available for purchase starting in the first quarter of 2025. The price should be accessible to households in Israel.
If robots for industrial or domestic use is nothing new, a humanoid robot based on artificial intelligence is. Today there are several companies, among them: Elon Musk’s Tesla, which presented the Optimus project about three years ago; Xiaomi’s Cyber One was introduced about two years ago and Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas was revealed back in 2013 and was recently retired.
Many companies, including some of the largest in the world such as Dyson, Honda or Huawei, also operate projects to develop humanoid robots, as well as other Israeli start-ups such as Unlimited Robotics. But according to Manti Robotics’ announcement, its robot is the first to be equipped with artificial intelligence as can be found behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbots, Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Cloud.
The advantage of using artificial AI such as ChatGPT is the robot’s ability to understand commands in simple human language. According to the company, it is capable of “a complete cycle of action from end to end – from a verbal command to the completion of a complex task that includes navigation, movement, understanding the situation, identifying objects and their location, grasping and understanding natural language. It will be operated by camera-based sensing only, electric motors developed by the company that enable Unprecedented agility and fully integrated artificial intelligence.”
Mentee Robotics was founded in 2022 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, the company’s chairman; Prof. Lior Wolff, the CEO, and Prof. Shai Shaliu-Schwartz. Mentee Robotics has been operating for the past two years in secret and has developed the humanoid robot for a wide range of activities both in private homes and in industrial warehouses.
The prototype of the Menteebot, as it is called, integrates artificial intelligence at all levels of its operation. The movement is based on an innovative approach of machine learning from simulation to reality (Sim2Real), in which the learning is carried out in a simulated version of the robot, which allows the use of an unlimited amount of data for training, so that it is then adapted to the real world but with minimal data requirements.
Mentee was founded in 2022 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, chairman of Mentee Robotics and a world-renowned expert in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, natural language processing and other tangential fields; Prof. Lior Wolff, CEO of Mentee Robotics and former researcher and director in Facebook AI Research; and Prof. Shai Shaliu-Schwartz, world-renowned computer scientist and machine learning researcher. So far, it has raised $17 million from Ahren Innovation Capital and other investors.
