Salem Robotics turns the robots hazardous facilities already own into autonomous survey and inspection workers. At every nuclear facility, highly trained radiation-protection teams spend hours each day walking the site by hand, mapping and searching for something life-threatening: radiation. These mandatory surveys are dangerous, expensive, and error-prone. Meanwhile, many plants already own capable robots that sit in a closet. Our software puts those robots to work. An operator defines the job from a simple dashboard, and the robot navigates the site, handles instruments, opens doors and turns valves, collects measurements, and generates auditable, compliance-ready reports. Because "mostly works" isn't good enough next to a reactor, our stack is deterministic with theoretical safety guarantees rather than a black-box AI, exactly what regulators and plant leadership require. It's hardware-agnostic, so facilities run it on robots they already own. Nuclear is our wedge. The same pain exists across oil, gas, chemical, and other hazardous sites, and that broader hazardous-industrial-inspection market is where we're headed. We're PhD roboticists from UT Austin who've spent the last five years deploying autonomous robots inside nuclear facilities at Los Alamos National Lab, with core manipulation research published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics among other publications. Get in touch: 📧 founders@salemroboticsinc.com 🌐 💼 LinkedIn: 🐦 X: We're looking for: • Intros to operations and innovation leaders at nuclear or other hazardous facilities (oil, gas, chem, bio, space) • Advice from founders who've sold into safety-critical industrial environments • Robotics engineers (ROS, motion planning, manipulation) who want to deploy real systems in the field #Robotics #Nuclear #Automation #YCombinator #YCS26 #Autonomy #IndustrialInspection #Hardtech #ROS Salem Robotics Inc: YC Summer 2026: Salem Robotics - Autonomous robots for hazardous spaces
