Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots

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 radioactive contamination. In an oil, gas, or chemical facility, an LDAR (leak detection and repair) inspection can require moving a detector around a particular valve, flange, or connection. Other inspections require positioning an instrument at a precise location and orientation relative to a pipe or piece of equipment.These are easy tasks to compress into verbs like "wipe", "measure", or "inspect", but considerably harder to make a robot do reliably. A probe might need to remain normal to a surface throughout a path, stay within a narrow offset from a pipe, or trace a region while maintaining a particular end-effector orientation. The planner has to find a feasible motion while respecting the task geometry, manipulator kinematics, joint limits, collisions, and the environment around it.We work down to joint-level control for those interactions. One problem we've spent a lot of time on is generating constrained ma