Martinez, California is located approximately in the San Francisco Bay Area from Silicon Valley. This small city on the northeastern edge of the bay is home to Hello Robot, a startup that is itself as far removed from the maximalist promises of its robotics rivals 45 miles to the south.
Hello Robot released the fourth version of its home support robot “Stretch” last month. And it may be a stretch to call it a humanoid robot. Stretch boasts a vaguely human-like torso and a sensor-studded head, but his telescoping arms have a pair of pincers and he moves around on a heavy omnidirectional wheeled base.
When Stretch’s battery dies, lights around its “eyes” light up — “They look angry,” jokes Blaine Matulevich, an engineer at the company.
Hello Robot, founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at Georgia Tech, isn’t building a foundational model or promising to take over every job that humans can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something that many other robots don’t: work with real people in real homes, when most robots work behind glass in labs.
This is very important. The latest advances in artificial intelligence promise to improve the capabilities of robots, but there is a lack of useful training data. And while simulation improves, investors are increasingly focused on implementation.
“First adopters have amassed site-specific recovery loops and workflow resilience that competitors cannot buy or synthesize,” Bullhound Capital said in a report on the space released last week. “In robotics, the moat is not just intellectual property, but operating hours accumulated under real-world responsibilities.”
another kind of manifestation
Keith Pratt, a Georgia investor and current director of Hello Robot, invested in the company after recruiting Stretch as a housemate. Pratt became a quadriplegic in 2021, with only control over his shoulders, neck and parts of his head. He began exploring adaptive technology and began working with Hello Robot in 2024. Hello Robot has an occupational therapist on its team to help work with Pratt and others with similar conditions.
Pratt uses a voice-activated iPhone app to control the stretches. He can command the robot to move autonomously anywhere in the house and then take over direct control to manipulate objects and perform tasks. One seemingly simple project was finding a way to get Mr. Stretch to serve protein shakes for breakfast. This usually requires the help of others.
“When I first started doing that activity, it took me almost two hours because I was alone and no one was there,” Platt told TechCrunch. “But I was going to stick with it. Within a few minutes, I was calm enough to drink the whole shake and put it back on the counter.”
Being dependent on others is a big challenge, both physically and mentally, Pratt says. Anything you can do to regain your independence, such as putting on and taking off your reading glasses or brushing your own teeth, is “very important.” Not only for him, but also for those who care about him.
He predicts that robotic assistants will “transform lives” for families if they allow people with reduced mobility to spend their days safely at home, and if they allow family members to work or go out independently without hiring professional caregivers.
Stretch is made in a factory with limited autonomy. The emphasis on human involvement is intentional. “Controlling is a function, and we want it to be embodied in robots,” Matulevich said.
And Pratt points out that Stretch isn’t worried about falling if an error occurs.
hardware is difficult
Despite all the money pouring into startups designing robot brains, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in robot bodies. Although components are becoming cheaper, modern technology still provides heavy limbs that require high-energy active balance. The weight of a robot’s hand or arm is much greater than that of a human, and the physics are unforgiving.
If the robot makes a mistake, it will damage things around it. One of the startups, Bot Company, is being sued by the owner of Airbnb in San Francisco. The company claims it rented an apartment to develop the robot, damaging furniture, breaking appliances, and removing bathroom tiles.
“From a ‘I want to replace my parents with a robot’ perspective, the state of the hardware today is actually terrible,” Mahi Shafiullah, a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies robotic hands, told TechCrunch. He recalled how an industrial robot in his lab accidentally punched through a plastic kitchen playset that it was supposed to be carefully manipulating.
Shafiullah eventually began using the third-generation Hello Robot stretch as part of his doctoral research at New York University. The model he helped develop at Stretch won the Best Demonstration Award at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference in at least 2018.
Hello Robot doesn’t promise that Stretch will have the complexity or functionality of the humanoid robots that fascinate Valley, but its simple design could make it more powerful. Edsinger compares his company to Waymo, which became a major supplier of self-driving cars by putting safety first (though it helped financially).
One of the leaders in this field, 1X, made a big splash last year when it introduced Neo, a humanoid robot that people can buy at home to perform chores. The company claims that the 10,000 units of Neos it plans to manufacture this year have been sold out, but as of now, not a single unit has actually been delivered.
“Hello Robot is very careful and mindful about this issue, because I think they design with people first,” Shafiullah said. “And they’re thinking about where are the features that fit within those limits.”
On the way home
The Stretch 4 is priced at a reasonable $30,000 for a robot, which is a little more expensive than robots from Chinese manufacturers, but Edsinger notes that these robots often don’t come with sensors or software, and add-ons ultimately drive up the price. He plans to manufacture 200 to 300 units at his headquarters in Martinez, and says the first batch has already sold out.
Edsinger wants to make the robot available to hackers and researchers on a low budget. One of the design criteria for Stretch is that it must be able to be shipped in a cardboard box via UPS or DHL. The need for crates and installation teams increases costs and reduces accessibility.
Hello Robot’s customers include researchers using Stretch to test increasingly sophisticated AI brains, enterprise customers testing Stretch’s usefulness in environments such as data centers, and people working to develop home aids for people with disabilities.
The combination of this robot’s comprehensive sensor suite, physical capabilities, and safe operation could make it a candidate to fulfill the wishes of physical AI believers.
“Algorithms may exist, but data does not. In fact, data is 80 percent of what matters,” Shafiullah said.
Having robots that can safely collect that data is another step forward. And Hello Robot is going to keep iterating. Lessons learned from the Stretch 4 rollout promise to inform the company’s next bots, potentially lowering prices and increasing functionality enough to realize the vision of robot-human collaboration in the home.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
