Salem Robotics (YC S26) gives industrial robots the skills to perform hazardous inspections
Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
Salem Robotics, a YC S26 startup founded by robotics researchers from UT Austin and Los Alamos National Laboratory, provides software that enables existing mobile robots to carry out complex inspection tasks in hazardous facilities like nuclear plants and oil refineries. Their system combines AI for semantic understanding with classical robotics for precise, constrained manipulation, allowing robots to perform procedures such as nuclear contamination smears and LDAR leak detection. They are hardware-agnostic, aiming to add a domain-specific application layer on top of capable platforms like those from Boston Dynamics. Starting with radiological inspections, they sell directly to industrial facilities, with deployments ranging from $100k to $500k per robot.
A few centimeters of error may not matter much when navigating down a hallway, but it matters if a sensor is supposed to remain normal to a curved surface.