Mobile robot platform for inspection and maintenance in complex environments
Nio Robotics is building Aru, a mobile inspection robot designed for demanding industrial and domestic environments. The stack—C++, EtherCAT, STM32 firmware, CAD—reflects hardware-first robotics engineering. The hiring profile (4 senior engineers, 1 lead, 1 ops hire) and active projects (firmware, OTA updates, reliability campaigns, stress tests) show a team focused on moving from prototype to production: they're tackling industrialization bottlenecks (field deployments, build-system scaling, observability gaps) that typically constrain hardware startups.
Nio Robotics, founded in 2020 and based in Toulouse, designs mobile robots for inspection, maintenance, and human collaboration in industrial and residential settings. The company's core differentiator is robot morphology—departing from standard bipedal or quadrupedal forms to prioritize agility and reliability in unstructured human environments. The platform combines embedded systems (EtherCAT motor control, STM32 microcontrollers), computer vision, and AI layers. With 11–50 employees and all hiring in France, the team is in early-stage production scaling, balancing hardware validation (stress tests, fault injection, reliability campaigns) with infrastructure maturity (CI/CD, OTA mechanisms, container registries).
C++, GitLab CI/CD, Yocto, EtherCAT, CAN, I2C, STM32, and CAD tools. The stack emphasizes embedded systems control and hardware abstraction for distributed robot electronics.
Core projects include Aru robot firmware for distributed electronics, OTA update mechanisms, reliability and stress-testing campaigns, simulation/visualization integration, CI/CD infrastructure, and the backend optimization framework that powers motion planning and task execution.
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