Yichao Zhong✈️RSS2026

@ErenChenAI “After review, the T800 didn’t hit hard to G1; decision: No foul, G1 diving, yellow card for G1”

Engine T800’s uppercut sent the Unitree G1 straight to the floor

@ShuoYangAIR @mondorobotics Congrats! What a robotically beautiful thing💛

A year ago, when I left Tesla Optimus to co-found Mondo, I made a promise to my son: I would build him a little robot buddy — something like the robot friends from our bedtime stories, but real. At the time, it was not really a product statement. It was a father’s promise to a little boy I love more than anything — a boy who loved stories about a child and his robot companion. Over the past year, that promise slowly became real — Beni the robot. Beni follows you, films you in 4K, moves across different terrain, jumps over obstacles, captures moments from new angles, and helps turn your clips into highlights. We designed it for families, pets, creators, athletes, and anyone who wants a robot that feels less like a gadget and more like a little sidekick. I’m deeply grateful to the Mondo team for turning countless prototypes, failures, late-night tests, and difficult tradeoffs into something people can finally meet. Although we have only just launched on Kickstarter, this world-class team is already deep in the “production hell”, and we expect to ship the product in the next few months. I’m also especially thankful to my family. Building hardware takes time, patience, and sacrifice from the people closest to you. Beni would not exist without their love and support. My son often visits our office and plays with Beni. Watching them together has reminded me why I started this journey in the first place. I do not want him to grow up thinking of robots only as distant machines in labs, factories, or videos. I want him to grow up in a world where robots can feel close, friendly, safe, and present — something he can play with, trust, and remember as part of his childhood. For the robotics community: Beni may look cute, but it is a serious robotics product. We used reinforcement learning to train Beni’s motion policies, with NVIDIA Isaac Lab and Google MuJoCo as part of our training and validation pipeline. Under the playful exterior are real robotics problems in locomotion, perception, control, and sim-to-real transfer. The lessons we are learning from Beni also directly inform our future humanoid product. Different form factor, same belief: advanced robotics should not feel distant or abstract. It should become close, present, and part of everyday life. For my son, Beni began as a promise. For Mondo Robotics, it is just the first step. Meet Beni: mondorobotics.com

Heading to #RSS2026 Sydney 🇦🇺 - I will present RoboNaldo at ExWBC workshop: opendrivelab.com/rss2026/worksh… Come and try defending the robot banger shoot😆 See you then!

Sydney-bound for #RSS2026, and not gonna lie, we’re buzzing! 🔥 On our slate: OpenDriveLab.com/rss2026/ 🎤 Dr. Hongyang Li — Early Career Spotlight 📄 Two papers we're proud of: RISE & EgoHumanoid 🤖 A humanoid doing real work on the floor - July 13th Morning Workshop Full rundown + where to find us 👇 @opendrivelab/opendrivelab-rss-2026-sydney-1427fd0215aa" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@opendrivelab/… Come have a yarn. #EmbodiedAI #WholebodyIntelligence #VLA #WorldModels #Sydney #ICC

Meet you in Sydney🇦🇺

💥We have released both training and deployment codebase for RoboNaldo: github.com/OpenDriveLab/R… 🏆 The #worldcup is entering knock-out round - now train your own strikers! Prepare for the Penalty shootouts!

💥We have released both training and deployment codebase for RoboNaldo: github.com/OpenDriveLab/R… 🏆 The #worldcup is entering knock-out round - now train your own strikers! Prepare for the Penalty shootout!

Very cool work! Looking forward to the day humanoids compete with human athletes on the same field.

The brand new motion-guided curriculum RL, brings the new paradigm for acute object interaction on humanoid platform. Go team and run for the 2030 World Cup ! ⚽️🏆

6/6 Hope you enjoy watching the #WorldCup! The external links for RoboNaldo project: Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2606.11092 Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=BuHNzq… Project website: opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo

5/6 This is the most exciting project I've ever done - my childhood dream of becoming a pro footballer continues...through a humanoid! Huge thanks to my marvelous @OpenDriveLab! This work would not come up without the dedicated collaborations from our whole team: @YidanLu2, Yuhang Lu, Tianyang Tang, @Lil_Hugology @yixuanpan99 @sephy_li @ilnehc @Alex_wangjingbo @ZhongyuLi4, Peng Lu, and @francislee2020. And also thanks to HKU Stanley Ho Sports Center for providing the pitches for our outdoor demo shooting.

The ⚽️ #WorldCup2026 kicks off tonight 🏆 — and we're sending a humanoid onto the pitch too! Meet RoboNaldo: a versatile humanoid football shooter. It can strike the ball up to 13m/s, accurately lands within 17 cm of a 3 m target away, outdoors on real grass pitch, off a live human pass, with fully onboard perception. opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo 🧵👇

Rising in physical world!

@Alex_wangjingbo Teleoped?

Love this

@HaoruXue You’re one of them too 🤣

Robotics lab, ca. 2026 ember-lab.eecs.berkeley.edu

My lab at CMU @LeCARLab is hiring a postdoc! (Vibe-made the poster via @ChatGPTapp)