Hello Robot’s Stretch Eyes Work Beyond the Home

As Aaron Edsinger discusses recent Stretch 4 deployments, my notions of the robot begin to shift. He describes a home care scenario in which a user sends the system into the kitchen via a simple smartphone interface. The beanpole robot rolls to the fridge, opens a door with a single gripper, and retrieves a drink.

Stretch with returns with the beverage, of course – that bit’s obvious. It’s the extra step that cements the notion, as its lift the Yeti mug up to the human’s mouth for a sip. Maybe it’s a small piece of the process, but it suddenly has me thinking less about Stretch as a robot tasked with doing housework, and more as a kind of embodiment for those whose own bodies are seriously impaired.

“The value is providing a sense of agency for people whose body really doesn't let them have that anymore,” says Edsinger, who serves as Hello Robot’s CEO. “It's the fact that you can go and get the drink for yourself and drink it yourself because it is a deeply meaningful thing to people in this situation. It’s simple compared to other things like unloading a dishwasher. We're really focused on the use cases where there's that high value, and there's a motivation to do it, even if it's slow and doesn't work as well as it can.”

People with mobility impairments have been a key focus since the startup’s 2017 founding. Robotics disability advocate and  Robots for Humanity, Henry Evans and his wife Jane sit on the company board. Henry also features heavily in footage promoting the newly announced Stretch 4.

“First off, we're talking about people with severe mobility impairments,” says Edsinger. “Often they're in a bed or they're in a chair. From there, we imagine going to broader kind of caregiving in the home with older adults. But for this user group, feeding is a big [use case]. It's something you want to do on your own. It's personal. Basic things of hygiene are things that we've seen. Simple things like just scratching an itch, getting a drink of water. Things that if you ask your care partner 20 times a day, then by the end of the day, you don't want to ask anymore.”

Stretch 4 takes the company a step closer to broader commercialization. Navigation has received a major upgrade from its predecessor. The system now features a pair of hemispherical 3D LiDAR sensors, coupled with fisheye RGB cameras, designed to reduce blind spots for the system and its arm. Stretch 4 is twice as fast as its predecessor and its reach has extended by 10%. The system is powered by NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and has a battery capable of running up to eight hours.

It’s available now for a hair under $30,000. The price is still, no doubt, prohibitively expensive, particularly for those with limited means. As such, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Stretch has thus far seen its greatest success outside the home. Research facilities like universities have thus been the robot’s largest market. Hello Robot is hoping that enterprise, a relatively new category for the startup, will overtake it soon.

“On the enterprise side, we haven't even started selling it or marketing it yet,” says Edsinger. “We've got a lot of inbound interest, and we already have one in pilot. We’ve seen a lot of interest around data centers, for example. There's a lot of kind of growth there, so with Stretch 4, we really want to explore with these enterprise type customers what can a mobile manipulator do in in these settings.”