UMA (Universal Mechanical Assistant)
About
About UMA (Universal Mechanical Assistant)
UMA develops mobile and humanoid robots intended to combine human-scale manipulation with physical-world perception and task learning. Its engineering covers robot hardware, dexterous control and embodied models, with the platform designed to acquire new work rather than remain limited to one fixed logistics or manufacturing process.
The company is preparing pilot programmes in logistics and manufacturing during 2026. Its founding team includes former Tesla, Google DeepMind and Hugging Face engineers with backgrounds in robot learning, autonomous systems and open-source AI. UMA is still at the prototype and customer-development stage, before serial commercial deployment of a named production robot.
Products
- Northstar
Northstar
Team
- Rémi Cadene - Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer - Leads company strategy and the integration of large-scale robot learning with general-purpose hardware.
- Robert Knight - Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer - Leads the physical robot architecture and hardware programme.
- Pierre Sermanet - Co-founder and Chief Science Officer - Leads UMA's learning architecture and embodied-AI research.
- Simon Alibert - Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer - Leads the software platform connecting learning systems to robot hardware.
Timeline
Events
- 2026-07-07 - Product Launch - UMA unveils Northstar humanoid and Real-Time Learning architecture
The July 7 reveal took place at the Machina Summit in Paris. Northstar is intended for factories, warehouses, logistics centres and other environments built around human tools and infrastructure. UMA says its Real-Time Learning architecture lets robots learn from demonstrations, receive guidance and improve through operational practice.
Source
Context
Comparable profiles
- Kepler Robotics
stack adjacency - General Purpose Humanoid Builder
- KAWADA Robotics Corporation
stack adjacency - General Purpose Humanoid Builder
Context tags
- General-purpose humanoid builder - Stack Layer - UMA describes general-purpose mobile and humanoid robots.
- Early Stage Humanoid - Commercial Stage - Northstar remains a development design and Version 0 prototype programme.
- Humanoid industrial builder - Peer Group - The 2026 pilot roadmap begins in manufacturing and logistics.
- Warehouse and Logistics - Customer Environment - Logistics is a named initial pilot lane.
- Human-robot interaction - Capability - The platform is designed for work in human-built environments.