Stretch Goals

There’s a laundry list of reasons robotics startups stay away from the home: price, scalability, the wildly unstructured environment that is your living room floor on a Sunday afternoon. The one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about of late is safety. This is due, in part, to a kind of paradoxical relationship between human and robot at the heart of the home.

The people most in need of assistance in the home are among society’s most vulnerable. They’re the increasing percentage of the population choosing to age in place, those living independently with disabilities, and people looking for an extra set of robot grippers to help out with the children.

 “You really have to take safety seriously,” says Aaron Edsinger. “There's the tactical side of it, business product side of it, and I’d say we still have a lot a lot of work to do.”

The last time I spoke with Hello Robot’s cofounder and CEO, things were a touch were a touch more chaotic on his end. He was at one of the Bay Area startup’s numerous pilots sites, observing its robot go to work in the real world. The company says that there are currently “hundreds” of the systems currently deployed around the world.

Edsinger’s teleconferencing background is more subdued, but Hello’s boss gives of an air of constant motion. Stretch 3, the latest version of the firm’s mobile manipulation home debuted fairly recently, but Edsinger is focused on making it better noting, “we're always working on the next version of the robot.”

The robot’s physical footprint hasn’t change too much since I wrote about the company coming out of stealth at the height of a global pandemic just over half-a-decade ago. A wheeled base remains Stretch’s foundation, propping up pole that allows a telescoping mobile manipulator to move up down, forward and back. Factor in the little Roomba-style base at the bottom, and we’ve suddenly got all our glorious cartesian coordinates covered.

I refer to this early model as an MVP (minimal viable product) – Edsinger and Hello are Silcon Valley adjacent after all, so I might as put my TechCrunch glossary to use. Elements of the label can be applied to the Stretch 3, but the phrase is particularly apt with the 2020 model, which Hello referred to as, Stretch Research Edition. It was open-source platform, designed to appeal to developers.

Five years and multiple iterations later, that bit hasn’t really changed. Stretch AI was an open-source stack built in-house in the not-too-distant days before open-source robotics AI stacks were available in bulk at Costco.

“Design-wise, it really is minimal, says Edsinger. “That really is intentional, so you reduce cost, complexity, increase safety. And then from the business perspective, we've been in the research education market, learning how to manufacture, support, really vet out. We started with that very minimal product, and now we're at a place where we can grow from there.”

Something Stretch decidedly is not, however, is a humanoid. This fact is relevant not only in light of the recent investment wave, but also Edsinger’s long robotics history. Two decades ago, under the supervision of then-MIT CSAIL Director Rodney Brooks, Edsinger developed Domo. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar,

Such a vision of robotic housekeeping is likely decades away from becoming reality. But at MIT, researchers are working on a very early version of such intelligent, robotic helpers--a humanoid called Domo who grasp objects and place them on shelves or counters. A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes.

That’s from an April 2007 MIT news piece on the wide-eyed humanoid.  Sometimes I think about that Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life where he and Meryl Streep are on trial after, watching clips from their time on Earth, only it’s me having to read my old blog posts where I quote roboticists telling me that something is “five to 10 years away.”

More to the point, 20 years after Domo, neither Edsinger nor Brooks’ current companies are building humanoids. Twenty-three years after the first Roomba, Brooks also appears to be done dealing with the home. For Edsinger, much of the domestic focus has shifted specifically to those in need of extra assistance.

The CEO notes,

It is providing the general utility of being able to navigate around a home reliably, to places that are important, pick up simple things and deliver simple things has high value for people that are mobility impaired – bringing water, food. Really, we’re not trying to do complex, dexterous tasks. Despite everything you see [in third-party robotics demos], I don’t think that’s market ready. We’re really focused on what someone can wake up every morning and say, ‘that worked great. I’m happy I spent my money on that.’