About Mels
Mels is an AI robotics sandbox. Build a robot with Lego-like blocks, train it with AI, and watch it take on challenges — no code required.
Get Started 👉 mels.ai to make your first Mel in minutes!
🌐 Fully browser-based — access instantly online: no downloads, no installs, no local GPUs
🎯 Custom RL environments — design new behaviors with custom rewards and training objectives
🧱 Modular morphologies — build any body from blocks and joints: humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled, hybrids
⚡ Real-time training — simulate millions of steps in minutes, live in your browser
🆓 Free on-device inference — train once in the cloud, interact forever locally
🤝 Creative community — share and discover creations on Discord
Learn More 🔗 mels.ai · Mels Dev Discord · Mels on Substack · @mels_ai on X · @mels_ai on YouTube
FAQ
What is Mels?
Mels is a creative platform for a new category of AI (a “Mel”) that’s neither an “agent” nor a “robot” but lives at the intersection of the two:
On one hand, Mels are digitally native and powered by state-of-the-art AI, including deep neural networks and reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making and actions
On the other hand, Mels are physically intelligent and embodied like robots, with the ability to sense, learn, and act based on real-world physics simulations
You can think of them as self-learning digital robots. But we like to call them Mels.
The Mels core loop is:
You see a challenge, like a creative prompt or a competitive leaderboard
You build a Mel with Lego-like blocks and joints, then train it with AI
You watch it learn on its own from scratch and take on the challenge
You keep tinkering to turn epic fails into shareable wins
You unlock new building blocks, creative tools, and challenges
All from your browser. No coding, AI, or robotics expertise required. With a community of makers like you.
How does Mels work?
Mels is powered by embodied AI systems invented at Google Research, combining massively parallel real-world physics simulation, state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning training, and efficient model inference to run complex robot AIs on any consumer device.
Traditionally, robotics simulation has required a lot of money, time, and expertise just to get set up. Then the experiments themselves take hours or days, leading to slow feedback loops and iteration. And finally, sharing experiments or reproducing others’ work is painfully clunky.
Now, one tap = instantly access, train, and share AIs with anyone, anywhere, on any device.
Mels turns your browser tab into an AI robotics sandbox where you can:
Train custom embodied AI agents in robotics simulation
Watch them learn and interact with them in real time
Share and load experiments instantly via a link
No cost. No setup. No barriers.
Who is Mels for?
Mels is for anyone who wants to create their own AI robot — no coding, AI, or robotics expertise needed. This includes:
Consumers playing in a creative sandbox
Students learning and educators teaching AI concepts hands-on
Creative technologists exploring a new interactive medium
Hobbyists and tinkerers who love making things
Game developers designing AI characters and behaviors
Researchers experimenting with deep reinforcement learning and robotics simulation
If you’re curious about AI and want to train your own robot, Mels is for you.
Why does Mels exist?
So much about AI is undefined, but one thing we know for sure is it’s changing everything. That feels big and scary but it also means we’re all in it together. We’re a generation defined not by age but by our shared experience of living through AI’s impacts.
There are many ways people, companies, and institutions can choose to exploit AI. It often starts with automating existing things to save time or money. And then maybe creating new AIs for you to use.
But you know what’s cooler than using AIs others make? Creating your own.
Creating your own AIs may sound like science fiction, intimidating, or just plain boring…but it doesn’t have to be! One of the special things about AI is that we can now make the experience of creating AIs as joyful and accessible as play. One everyone can take part in.
We believe creative play is the best way to put the power of creating AIs into everyone’s hands. Because time and again, people will surprise you when you give them the power to bring their imaginative creations to life.
(Spoiler alert: extraordinary things happen :)
About Luda
Luda is a new kind of AI lab that believes **play is the highest form of research.**
We’re a team of veteran misfits who fuse deep technology (Google Research, SAP, Magic Leap) with interactive media (Disney, Anki, Sims). Our investors and advisors include Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google), Illia Polosukhin (co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”), Bing Gordon (ex-CCO of Electronic Arts), Scott Belsky (Partner at A24), and senior researchers at Google DeepMind and Anthropic.