Robotics Engineers Wanted - Join the Nepher Robotics Tournament

About Nepher Robotics

Nepher Robotics is building the premier evaluation and training ground for embodied AI. Our mission is to bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical execution by creating high-fidelity simulation environments where advanced robotics models can be trained, tested, ranked, and refined.

As robotics hardware continues to improve, the real bottleneck is no longer only the robot body. The critical challenge is the intelligence layer: the policies, models, control logic, training systems, and evaluation methods that allow robots to perform reliably in real-world environments. Nepher is building the infrastructure where robotic “brains” are developed, benchmarked, improved, and prepared for real-world use.

About the Nepher Robotics Tournament

The Nepher Robotics Tournament is a competitive R&D environment for AI and robotics engineers, research teams, students, startups, and robotics companies. Participants compete to solve challenging embodied AI problems using simulation-based robotics workflows.

Unlike traditional AI competitions that focus only on final model outputs, Nepher emphasizes full robotics projects. Participants are encouraged to think beyond a single model file and develop complete, reproducible robotics solutions, including simulation setup, training pipeline, reward design, policy architecture, control logic, curriculum strategy, and evaluation results. This “projects over policies” approach makes each submission more useful, explainable, and adaptable for real robotics applications.

Tournament challenges may involve areas such as:

Robotic locomotion

Industrial manipulation

Humanoid control

Autonomous mobile robots

Warehouse automation

Precision task execution

Inspection and navigation

Digital twin-based robotics testing

Sim-to-real robotics policy development

Evaluation Methodology

The tournament evaluates submissions using both public and private datasets.

During the competition period, participants can evaluate their models using the environment provided with the public EnvHub dataset. These evaluations are intended for benchmarking and comparison purposes only and do not represent the final tournament ranking.

All submitted models are re-evaluated during the official evaluation phase using the private dataset. The scores obtained from the private evaluation determine the final rankings.

Evaluations are conducted exclusively by verified validators. The tournament currently includes multiple verified validators that independently and deterministically evaluate model performance on both the public and private datasets. Final rankings are calculated by aggregating validator scores according to validator weights within the network. Through distributed validation and weighted score aggregation, the tournament ensures a transparent, deterministic, and fair evaluation process.

Who Should Apply or Participate

We are looking for individuals and teams with experience or strong interest in:

Robotics engineering

Embodied AI

Reinforcement learning

Simulation-based training

NVIDIA Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab

Computer vision for robotics

Control systems

Motion planning

Robot manipulation

Humanoid robotics

Autonomous systems

Python, PyTorch, ROS2, or related robotics tools

We welcome participation from:

Individual AI and robotics engineers

University students and graduate researchers

Student robotics clubs and research labs

Startup teams

Independent builders

Robotics companies

Industrial automation teams

What You Will Do

As a tournament participant, you will work on robotics challenges designed to evaluate real embodied AI performance. Depending on the challenge, you may:

Build and train robotic agents in simulation

Design reward functions and training workflows

Improve policy performance across benchmark environments

Test robotic intelligence under varied physical and environmental conditions

Submit reproducible robotics projects for evaluation

Compete against other participants on performance, robustness, and technical quality

Demonstrate your robotics engineering ability through measurable results

Why Participate

The Nepher Robotics Tournament is designed to create a serious proving ground for robotics talent and embodied AI innovation. Participants can:

Showcase their skills in a competitive robotics environment

Build portfolio-ready robotics projects

Gain visibility among robotics companies, researchers, and ecosystem partners

Work on meaningful embodied AI challenges

Compete to solve practical robotics problems

Contribute to the future of simulation-first robotics development

Potentially create work that can be adapted, validated, or commercialized through Nepher’s broader ecosystem

Nepher’s long-term vision includes building a marketplace and ecosystem where validated robotics intelligence, training recipes, simulation environments, and benchmarked projects can become reusable assets for the robotics industry.

Ideal Candidate Profile

You do not need to be an expert in every area, but strong candidates will have one or more of the following:

Experience with reinforcement learning or robotics simulation

Strong Python programming skills

Familiarity with physics-based simulation environments

Understanding of robot control, perception, or planning

Interest in embodied AI and real-world robotics

Ability to work independently or as part of a technical team

Strong problem-solving ability and willingness to experiment

How to Participate

Anyone can participate in the Nepher Tournament without restrictions. Because the tournament is built on the Bittensor ecosystem and rewards are distributed in TAO, participation is completely voluntary.

To get started, participants simply need to:

1. Create a TAO wallet

2. Create a Nepher account

3. Register a Hotkey on the Nepher subnet (Subnet 49)

Interested individuals, teams, university groups, and robotics companies are invited to apply or contact us through our website. Please include a short note about your background, team, robotics experience, and the types of challenges you are most interested in.

Official Links & Platforms:

Main Website: https://nepher.ai/

Tournament Platform: https://tournament.nepher.ai/

If you have any questions about the tournament, please join the Subnet 49 (Nepher) community channels:

Nepher Discord: https://discord.gg/nepher

Bittensor Discord: https://discord.com/invite/bittensor

Pay: From $4,000.00 per week

Work Location: Remote