Mirsee Robotics
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Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
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v4 · 2,085 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
| Mirsee Robotics | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Full name | Mirsee Robotics Inc. |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Founders | Tarek Rahim, Robert Ings |
| Headquarters | 485 Pinebush Road, Suite 203, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada |
| Industry | Robotics, Humanoid robots |
| Products | MH1, MH2, MH3 humanoid robots |
| Key technology | Hybrid hydrostatic rotary actuators, VR teleoperation, AI autonomy |
| Website | mirsee.com |
Mirsee Robotics is a Canadian robotics company based in Cambridge, Ontario, that designs and manufactures humanoid robots for industrial applications. Founded in 2017 by Tarek Rahim and Robert Ings, the company has developed three generations of humanoid robots, with its current flagship being the MH3, a wheeled humanoid designed for physically demanding tasks in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and defense. Mirsee designs and assembles all of its robots in Ontario, positioning itself as one of Canada's few homegrown humanoid robotics companies.[1][2]
The company combines its patented hybrid hydrostatic rotary actuator technology with immersive virtual reality teleoperation and AI-enhanced autonomy, taking a deliberately practical approach to humanoid design. Rather than pursuing the bipedal walking machines that dominate marketing demos in the industry, Mirsee has chosen wheeled mobility to maximize stability, runtime, and reliability in real industrial environments.[3][4]
Mirsee Robotics was established in 2017 by Tarek Rahim and Robert Ings. Rahim, the company's chief executive officer, brought a background in mechanical design with experience leading the development of more than 1,000 robotic subcomponents. Ings serves as lead electronics designer and is the primary inventor of the company's hybrid hydrostatic actuator technology. Before joining Mirsee, Ings founded the engineering firm AW-SoM.[3]
In its earliest phase the company explored applications in healthcare and senior care before pivoting to focus on industrial environments such as manufacturing, logistics, and hazardous-duty work. Rahim has noted that when Mirsee was founded, humanoid robotics was a relatively obscure field, saying "back then it was not a glamorous industry." The company spent the years that followed building out a vertically integrated engineering operation in Cambridge, Ontario, designing and assembling arms, hands, heads, vision systems, batteries, and actuators in-house.[1][4]
Mirsee has iterated through three full hardware generations since its founding. The first-generation MH1 was released in 2021 and featured 28 degrees of freedom, a six-hour runtime, and limited payload and reach. The second-generation MH2 followed in 2023, introducing 24 degrees of freedom, an eight-hour runtime, hot-swappable batteries, longer arms, increased payload capacity, and an omni-directional mobile base. The MH2 was operated exclusively through teleoperation. The current third-generation MH3, released in 2025, expands to 31 degrees of freedom, adds a ten-hour runtime, wireless charging, and combines remote teleoperation with AI autonomous control.[5]
Mirsee received a $500,000 award from the Canadian Department of National Defence through its Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program. The funding supports the development of high-immersion, teleoperated robots designed for hazardous jobs that pose risks to human workers. The company has also received support from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).[3][5]
In the mid-2020s Mirsee announced a partnership with Eclipse Automation, a Canadian automation engineering firm headquartered in Cambridge. Under the partnership, Eclipse provides advanced manufacturing capabilities, systems integration knowledge, and access to digital infrastructure including NVIDIA Omniverse for AI training and simulation. The collaboration is intended to accelerate the path from prototype humanoids to production-scale industrial deployment.[4]
The company also lists Stanford University among its collaborators, and its advisor network includes Patrick Martinson of Clearpath Robotics, another Canadian robotics firm.[3][5]
Mirsee has raised funding from investors including Redstick Ventures, which highlighted the company's patent portfolio, vertically integrated engineering team, and what the firm described as "remarkable progress with minimal funding" as reasons for backing the company. As of early 2026 Mirsee employs roughly ten people, and Rahim has stated that the company plans to double headcount to about twenty employees within six months.[1][3]
The MH3 is Mirsee's third-generation humanoid robot and the company's current flagship product. Rather than walking on two legs, the MH3 uses a wheeled base for mobility, a design choice intended to maximize battery life, simplify control, and improve stability in industrial settings. The robot is designed to extend human capabilities into physically demanding, hazardous, and hard-to-staff environments.[1][2]
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 180 cm |
| Weight | 125 kg |
| Degrees of freedom | 31 total |
| Hand DOF | 6 per hand (5 fingers each) |
| Arm payload | 30 kg per arm |
| Battery life | Up to 10 hours |
| Charging | Wireless |
| Maximum speed | 5 km/h |
| Mobility | Omni-directional wheeled base |
| Camera | 12 megapixel |
| Ingress protection | IP54 |
| Frame material | Aluminum 6061 |
| Motor type | Brushless DC (BLDC) |
| Gear systems | Harmonic and planetary |
| Operating system | ROS 2 |
| Onboard compute | NVIDIA-based |
| Visual latency | Sub-100 milliseconds (glass to action) |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite options |
| Control modes | AI autonomy and immersive VR teleoperation |
The MH3 combines artificial intelligence driven autonomy with VR-based teleoperation, allowing operators to control the robot remotely with haptic feedback. Target sectors include manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure. Demonstrations have shown the MH3 locating objects, picking them up, and moving them, with applications including bin picking, tote moving, sorting, and handling heavy materials.[2][4][6]
As of early 2026 the MH3 is in pre-production. Mirsee has built two MH3 robots and expects to build six more during the course of 2026, with plans to transition to a mass-production model in 2027. Voice command and AI-driven conversational response capabilities are being added to the platform.[1]
The second-generation MH2 was released in 2023 and served as the bridge between Mirsee's earliest prototypes and its current flagship. Operated exclusively via teleoperation, the MH2 featured 24 degrees of freedom, an eight-hour runtime with hot-swappable batteries, an extended arm reach, higher payload capacity than its predecessor, and an omni-directional mobile base. The platform validated Mirsee's wheeled humanoid approach and refined its actuator, control, and perception systems.[5]
The first-generation MH1, released in 2021, was Mirsee's introductory humanoid platform. It featured 28 degrees of freedom and a six-hour battery runtime, with limited payload and reach compared to later generations. The MH1 served primarily as a development and validation platform for the company's actuator and control technologies before more capable models entered production.[5]
Mirsee's engineering philosophy emphasizes practical industrial deployment over research demonstrations. The company has pursued a vertically integrated approach in which all major subsystems, including arms, hands, vision systems, batteries, and actuators, are designed and assembled at its Cambridge, Ontario facility.[1][4]
A central piece of Mirsee's technology is its patented hybrid hydrostatic rotary actuator, invented by co-founder Robert Ings. The device, covered by United States patent US10895271B2, was filed in March 2019 and granted in January 2021. It converts hydraulic and pneumatic pressure into rotary motion suitable for robotic joints. The design uses a curved (toroidal) piston connected to an axle shaft, separated from pressurized chambers by resilient rolling diaphragms or inflatable tubular barriers.[7]
The actuator can be configured in three modes: hybrid hydraulic and pneumatic, dual hydraulic, or dual pneumatic. It supports both "active" sensor-based electronic control and "passive" direct mechanical transmission through hoses. The compact form factor is scalable across torque ranges and can be manufactured using lightweight composite materials, including via 3D printing. The actuator is designed for use in environments with high magnetic and electrical noise, where conventional electric servo motors may struggle.[3][7]
The hydrostatic design provides smooth, high-speed rotary motion with precise force feedback, which Mirsee uses to deliver realistic haptic sensations to human operators during teleoperation. Patent claims describe applications in robotic manipulation, prosthetics, exoskeletons, telemedicine, and collaborative robotics.[7]
Mirsee deliberately avoided legged humanoid designs in favor of an omni-directional wheeled base. CEO Tarek Rahim has described the choice as prioritizing "real-world reliability over flashy design," arguing that legged systems introduce significant complexity without delivering performance gains for industrial workloads. The wheeled base is harder to knock over than a bipedal frame and allows the MH3 to operate continuously for up to ten hours per charge, far longer than walking humanoids of comparable size.[4]
Mirsee's teleoperation system uses an immersive virtual reality headset combined with haptic gloves or controllers, allowing a remote operator to see through the robot's cameras, manipulate objects with the robot's hands, and feel force feedback through the hydrostatic actuators. End-to-end latency from camera input to robot motion is kept below 100 milliseconds. The system is designed to put skilled workers virtually on site in dangerous environments, including water treatment plants and other facilities where direct human entry carries risk.[1][3]
The MH3 supports both teleoperated and autonomous operation. The platform uses NVIDIA-based onboard compute and runs the ROS 2 middleware. Through its partnership with Eclipse Automation, Mirsee has gained access to NVIDIA Omniverse for AI training and simulation, which the company uses to develop machine-learning models that allow the robot to refine its task performance over time. Mirsee's product roadmap describes a progression from teleoperation through semi-autonomous to fully autonomous operation, with various large language model integrations supported for natural-language interaction.[3][4][6]
All major components of Mirsee's robots, including batteries, are designed and built by the team in Ontario. The company has emphasized this in-house approach as a way of reducing supply chain dependencies, particularly given that many competing humanoid programs rely on Chinese suppliers for key subsystems. The vision system used in the MH3 is also Canadian-made.[1]
Mirsee targets industries with labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, or high physical demands. Stated focus sectors include energy, utilities, manufacturing, food processing, water treatment, logistics, healthcare, infrastructure, and defense. The company has secured pilot programs in water treatment facilities in Canada, validating its platform in demanding industrial environments where the combination of teleoperation and humanoid form factor allows tasks to be performed without sending human workers into hazardous areas.[3]
As of early 2026 the MH3 is in pre-production with no large-scale commercial deployments yet. Mirsee's stated timeline calls for warehouse and manufacturing facility deployment beginning in 2027, expansion into broader commercial environments over the following three to five years, and eventual application in retail, office, and home settings within the following decade.[1][4]
The company has indicated that it is exploring a robotics-as-a-service business model alongside direct hardware sales, with potential offerings including ongoing maintenance, software licensing, and outright robot purchases.[3]
Mirsee operates in an increasingly competitive global humanoid robotics market that includes Tesla with Optimus, Figure AI, Agility Robotics with Digit, Boston Dynamics with Atlas, 1X Technologies, Apptronik, and a growing number of Chinese firms such as Unitree Robotics and UBTech. Rahim has acknowledged that Chinese competitors are "far ahead of Western competitors" in some respects, while positioning Mirsee's vertically integrated, made-in-Canada approach as a differentiator for customers concerned about supply chain risk.[1]
In 2026, Toyota Canada announced plans to deploy Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid at its Woodstock, Ontario assembly plant, an event that brought renewed attention to homegrown Canadian alternatives such as Mirsee.[1]
| Role | Person |
|---|---|
| Co-founder and CEO | Tarek Rahim |
| Co-founder and lead electronics designer | Robert Ings |
Rahim oversees mechanical design and corporate strategy. He has spent roughly eight years building humanoid hardware from the ground up, designing arms, hands, vision systems, and other subsystems internally. Ings leads the electronics, control systems, and actuator engineering, and is the named inventor on the company's hybrid hydrostatic actuator patent.[1][3][7]