MoonBot — YC Robotics Hackathon (w/ Innate)

May 1, 2026 · 1 min read

Built MoonBot (with R. Feingold, G. Voss, L. Knak, N. Rodriguez) at the Y Combinator Robotics Hackathon — sponsored by NASA, DeepMind, Scale AI, Nebius, ElevenLabs, Dryft, and Iterate.

An autonomous robot for inspection / intervention in space-like environments under a fully embedded, edge-first architecture (no cloud, no external compute).

  • Perception: AprilTag-based target localization from camera feeds.
  • Interaction: once a target is reached, an ACT (Action Chunking Transformer) policy trained by imitation learning maps perception directly to action.
  • Navigation/control designed to be robust to partial observability.

Python · PyTorch · OpenCV · ROS 2

Embodied AI Imitation Learning ACT Perception
Lorenzo Ortolani
Authors
Lorenzo Ortolani (he/him)
Roboticist · Physical AI & VLA for Humanoids
I build Physical AI — robots that perceive, reason, and act in the real world. My focus is advancing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies so that a single humanoid can learn a diverse library of skills and choose the right one for whatever industrial task it faces, generalizing far beyond a single demonstration. I co-founded TalOS Robotics AI to put this in operators’ hands, and I work across the full stack: locomotion and navigation, learned manipulation, sim-to-real, and the agent tooling that wraps it all together.