I’ve recently left the Tesla Optimus team to co-found Mondo Tech with my longtime friend and former DJI colleague, Soren. I’m incredibly appreciative of the opportunity to contribute to Elon’s vision for general-purpose humanoid robots. Optimus has pushed both technical frontiers and society’s imagination of what it might look like for humans and robots to coexist more closely. I’m still a firm believer, but I’m chasing a different path. We’d like to test the hypothesis that smaller, more accessible robots, designed with consumer applications in mind, can be both meaningful products today and foundational platforms tomorrow. These systems will be compact, safe, user-friendly, and useful, capable of running modern machine learning algorithms on a fully self-developed embedded and mechatronic stack. We’re building teams in both Palo Alto and Shenzhen. If you’re passionate about embedded systems, ML/RL, and you want to build mini robots that can serve as little friends in people’s lives, we’d love to hear from you. That said, what truly cemented this decision is something more personal: Our son is almost three. He loves stories. Every night, I tell him adventures about a boy named Pike and his robot companion Nick. Nick helps fix trains using his own parts, scouts mountains (adapting into a drone), and stays up all night when Pike is sick. These stories came from a place of love and hope that he might grow up in a world where robots aren’t just tools, but friendly companions. My son never met Optimus, though he used to watch Optimus videos with me. But when I had to leave him crying to return to the lab, he gradually lost interest. Most nights, after storytime, I’d drive back to work, tuning Optimus algorithms in the Tesla lab, while watching him sleep on the baby monitor, wondering what future I was building for him. One night, I told him: “Daddy’s not working on that robot anymore. I’m going to build you one, like Nick. One that can be with you every day.” He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Okay.” And that was all I needed.

This is an impressive work

Chao is one of the best roboticists I know

DiT4DiT is now open source! As the first humanoid-deployable Video-Action Model built on a world model, DiT4DiT continues to surprise us. In our paper last month, we showed its strong data efficiency. Now, with only slight modifications, it enables real-time whole-body autonomous pick-and-place. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.10448 Code: github.com/Mondo-Robotics/Di… Website: dit4dit.github.io/

Additional to a team of people who can deploy world model based manipulation model on humanoids (Please read dit4dit.github.io), Mondo also has a team of people who can build the best consumer robot in the world. You will get this robot at a low price soon.

We’re excited to share DiT4DiT, an end-to-end Video-Action Model for robot learning that unifies a video Diffusion Transformer and an action Diffusion Transformer in a single cascaded framework. By leveraging the rich spatiotemporal and physical dynamics learned through video generation, rather than static image-text priors, DiT4DiT achieves state-of-the-art results on LIBERO (98.6%) and RoboCasa GR1 (50.8%) with far less training data, delivering over 10× better sample efficiency and up to 7× faster convergence. Real-world deployment on a humanoid robot further shows robust generalization. We believe this is a step toward making video generation a powerful backbone for robot policy learning. This work builds upon the brilliant foundations laid by Nvidia's GR00T and Cosmos. Project: dit4dit.github.io/ Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.10448 Code: Coming soon. In the meantime, you can ask your coding agent to reproduce the method based on GR00T/Cosmos.

Had a pleasant meeting with brilliant roboticists @TairanHe99 and @zhengyiluo. I am sure Nvidia will win 2026’s robot foundation model race!

While you are waiting @openclaw to install. Make sure you look at GitHub (github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot) page to see all the hot tech bros… So you learn how to create your next profile pic.

Many people in the Bay Area told me they noticed that many top robotics engineers have RoboMaster experience. This is a 2019 interview between @ashleevance and me explaining what RoboMaster is. Since then, the competition has trained more than 20,000 robotics engineers. Almost all top institutes working on robotics (Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Tesla, Unitree, Amazon, OpenAI, and Mondo Robotics of course) have RoboMaster alumni. youtube.com/watch?v=aPzq1DoP…

You may have seen lots of amazing drone delivery videos. This is an airport of drones, operated by Meituan in Shenzhen, where all delivery operations initiate. It worth to mention that my 2013 paper “Precise quadrotor autonomous landing with SRUKF vision perception” proposed a landing marker design, which could be the inspiration of the marker design used here.

This is very important for the robotics industry.

Meanwhile as a founder I am studying @ericjang11’s 2016 post on variational method in order to understand VAE in order to understand diffusion policy in order to understand why people no longer talk about it anymore.

Proud of my wife @lexie_ma!

Just noticed the star of Meta’s super AI team @jhyuxm followed me before. As an AI/robotics engineer, I feel more flattered than got followed by Cristiano Ronaldo. Congrats again @jhyuxm. It’s an honor to live in this era with you.

Congrats to @zhou_xian_ and @gs_ai_ for gathering a dream team to build future dreamland for robotics!

Hi there!

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.