Robots that repeat
procedural skills like experts

Heylper lets robots repeat procedural skills like experts. It is the expert brain above the robot's motor skills: it learns a skill from an expert's demonstration, refines it by guiding people through it, and then guides the robot through it — remembering the expert's procedure, and holding the robot to it.

1.Robots arrive with motor skills, not procedural skills

A robot comes with motor skills, its muscle memory: the capacity to grasp, place, probe, turn. A robot on a foundation model gets them from its VLA; a robot on ROS gets them as tools and primitives. They are generic — the same on every site.

What it does not come with is procedural skill: how an expert does a whole job. Which steps, in what order, what to check, what counts as done, what to do when it goes wrong. Procedural skill is specific — your welder's way, your technician's way — and it is what customers and auditors actually judge. A robot that has motor skills but not the procedure is capable, and not reliable.

2.Where Heylper sits: the brain above the motor skills

A robot's motor skills take one instruction at a time. Something above them has to supply the next instruction and check the last — a planner. That planner is the core of Heylper's expert brain: it remembers, reasons and plans. It never generates motion. It remembers the expert's procedure, gives the next step, checks it was done, and does not move on until it was.

• The job"Service the control cabinet."
• Heylper · the expert brainRemembers the expert's procedural skill — order, checks, techniques, recovery — gives the next instruction, checks the last, holds the robot to it.
• The robotMotor skills — a VLA on a humanoid, or tools and primitives on ROS. One instruction in, motion out.

A procedural skill is captured at four levels of detail:

• L1 · TaskThe goal — "Make espresso"
• L2 · StepsThe plan — grind → tamp → pull
• L3 · ActionsThe doing — position, press, hold
• L4 · TechniquesThe quality — 25 lbs, elbow above

Each level is carried out in the expert's world — the tools, places and machines of the job — and with their people: when to check, when to ask, who to hand over to.

3.The Expert Hat, in three beats

The Expert Hat is a role, not a device: whatever is watching, listening and guiding on the expert's behalf. It can be a display on a stand, glasses, a phone. In the films it is a humanoid — a Unitree G1 running Heylper — and that makes the robot an apprentice. It is the customer's robot, not ours, and what it learns is the procedure, not the motions. It stays through all three beats; only its role changes: it watches, it guides, it does.

Learn — it watches the expert

The expert demonstrates the job. The apprentice watches, listens and talks back — confirming steps, asking why — and captures the procedural skill: the order, the checks, the technique, the small choices that never reach a manual.

Refine — it guides the expert's colleagues

Then it guides the expert's junior colleagues through the skill, on the expert's behalf — a different colleague each session, step by step. Guiding is how it finds the gaps in its memory: where it is unsure, and after each success or failure, the expert corrects it, and every correction sharpens the skill before the robot runs it alone. It is useful work on its own: frontline guidance, which is what we have done for twenty years.

Guide — it does the job

Now it does the job on its own. On a humanoid with a foundation model, Heylper guides by voice, as it guided the people. On a robot on ROS, it calls the robot's tools. Either way the robot repeats the job the expert's way, and every run is checkable against the procedure.

Patent pending — Heylper Expert Skill Transfer.

4.Two kinds of skill, learned two ways

Motor skills are learned from teleoperation and refined in simulation. Procedural skills are learned from experts and refined with people. Heylper is the second pipeline.

Heylper does not replace the first. It uses the robot's motor skills, and supplies the procedural skill. In the first pipeline the simulator is software. In the second, the simulator is your own people — and the sessions that refine the skill are the same sessions that train them.

5.Works with the robots you have

Heylper is not a robot, not a motor policy, and not a replacement for ROS. It is the expert brain above whatever stack you run — a foundation-model humanoid, or a mobile robot or arm on ROS — and the skills it learns are portable across all of them. It is agentic, and it is the expert's agent: free in how it carries out the procedure, never in what the procedure is.

• HumanoidsAny humanoid running Heylper becomes an apprentice: guided by voice, as a person would guide a new colleague. The films show a Unitree G1; any platform with a foundation model will do.
• Other robotsMobile robots and arms on a bench, on ROS: guided by tool calls against the robot's own primitives.
• PeopleGuided by the same Hat, from the same skill — which is how the skill gets good in the first place.

Access

Heylper is free while it is in beta. For early access, to capture a skill with your experts, or to put the Hat on your robot, write to us — a person reads every message.

New to the idea? Why Heylper says it in two lines.