The biggest problem is they are using RC style servos. This is why all the arm motions are jerky and lack precision.
What this means:
No force feedback on positioning.
Jerky motion due to actuator steps.
Limited precision.
Terrible slow motion control performance. Fast movements will look better.
Inability to solve problems with software.
Basically think of all the joints like those cheap thermal camera screens that are at 320 x 240 resolution. For rough work or finding some sort of oddity your good, but anything precise you need to spend real money. It's a pretty cool toy, but don't go buying this expecting that much.
Can you be up front about its real capabilities. Are these videos of it eg tidying up real or just staged / cherry picked?
If you let it loose in a messy room or stirring something in a kitchen, what are the genuine results you would expect in the wild?
We’re all used to seeing things like Atlas back flipping but then can’t do anything in a real environment. Just curious how this fits in and what the success / fail rate is.
That video of it folding clothes would seem to hint at that. It's only able to awkwardly throw it into a pile, but they still included it. It's clearly a very cool project, but it suggests the claimed capabilities are more show than substance.
Where are you guys in SF? Would love to come see it. Mostly interested in seeing the speed of action (what multiple is the video replay at, etc.) and looking at center-of-mass etc. issues. I have a pretty straightforward use-case in a home. The Dreame we have in the living room is pretty good at avoiding most obstacles, but I usually have an LLM-based agent review the image automatically and either send out the vacuum or suggest moving things that would foul it up. Works great. Obviously substituting with a humanoid capable of reaching ground height things and picking up children's toys etc. would be great.
I'd want to bolt it with a mount to the wall when not in use because it needs to be climb-resistant for children during the daytime when I don't need it functional but there is a solid 8 hour 2200->0700 window when no one will be in the living room and speed is not an issue.
I was talking to my wife about this device and actually the wheeled form factor and (probably) no control software for balance is a feature for our use-case because when the Unitree G1 or whatever falls over the result is catastrophic. The balance control software attempts pure insanity and will likely kill a child nearby.
Wow, I have the exact same use case. Just move stuff off the floor so my vacuum robot can run and my life will improve 3-4x. Easy $2000 buy.
The matic is being sold as one with better obstacle avoidance and I have no doubt it does but the point is I want the obstacle out away and the floor cleaned underneath.
Website absolutely kills my S21U/Edge phone to view. Shame, this looks super cool. I'll check it out on my laptop later when I have a moment. Price seems enticing too.
My question would be how riffable is it? I don't have 10-20k to drop on a robot. I work for co-ops so while I make good money(90k~ pretty good!) its less than I could make else where but the trade off is I have more time to build random stuff. 2k is the price point for me where I might buy a big thing every so many years, teaching this to play board games, making new hands for it, teaching it to clean etc would be fun and at a price point that works for me. I would probably want a suction attachment for the fingers so it could handle cards and other flat tokens but that seems simple enough to build given the 3d models for printing are included.
I could see myself printing all sorts of costumes for it and using it as an ad hoc characters for tabletop games or as a spare bandmate if I ever finish my synth.
"We make money by selling the hardware for $1,688, with optional paid software on top."
The software would have to be quite good and also affordable for me to consider it, as all subscriptions are liabilities. I might one day want my robot to go with me to a show or to do something meaningful. Whenever that happens I will NOT be held hostage by software and will either source my own software or replace parts of the hardware till something works before I keep throwing money at a bad service. I would prefer to just have a good vendor supported software that I don't have to think about but I have trust issues. Privacy would be a huge concern, I can't have this in my garage lab with all my stuff being sent back to your servers for computer vision tasks etc.
I'm confused, is this a research device, hobby/tinker item, or consumer product?
I don't mean to be negative, but making a sustainable business on a hardware race to the bottom sounds challenging.
I'd be curious to to know from others here, what in-home tasks do people think they'll really be able to automate with any of the various bimanual or humanoid robot platforms that seem to be going around?
Nothing, none of these are good enough to do any home tasks reliably. These are all research/hobbyist devices that won't be interesting for another 5-10 years. Probably a bunch of fun to play around with though.
RPi5 seems a bit underpowered for all the sensors & control and offloading to a computer through wifi seems problematic. A Jetson Orin Nano would seem to be a better choice for a robot. Unfortunately Nvidia recently substantially increased the prices for their jetson devkits due to component shortages (DRAM,storage, etc), and what was $250 now costs $499 :(
This is cool! As someone who's built based off of old Roomba platforms and other models, I feel like this looks pretty fun and a good price point. What do you think the next version will target? Will you stay educational and low price point? Targeting some other usecases?
Love the design and freedom of this! Curious what the business model of this is to make the company sustainable. Asking that because I was part of the K-scale labs community and sad to see it shut down due to the competition with low-cost chinese robots
Is there a term for the design style of the plastic panels? I've been seeing it more often, for instance the robot wheeled base looks like an Amazon Delivery Van. Hidden screws, 45degree angles but with soft corner bends.
It's higher latency than pulling strings. Until we get on device AI, humanoid robots will not be useful.
At this point, I think with the speed of AI development, the AI will be designing it's own body. It'll be ready to do that before humans figure out how to produce useful bodies.
1. Does this require internet connectivity? If Nori goes out of business, can we keep using these?
2. Is the app distributed as an APK outside of the Play Store? Does it have any hard requirements on GMS that would prevent users of degoogled devices from using it?
3. Is every function available through the app possible to perform or recreate with the open SDK? Is this robot (now, and in the future) going to be accessible to technically competent folks who don't own a smartphone at all?
4. Is there a privacy policy on your website for the robot itself? Is there any telemetry? What kind? Will it be recording me without me asking it to? Is the software that ships on it totally open source?
Cool project! I might be quite interested, depending on how much it respects user freedoms and privacy.
The site is broken can’t see much, but it would be great to know or show list of the components or BOM, as from experience, some companies cheap on certain sensors/motors etc.
Based on the video evidence with the eyes widening down the page I suspect that this robot can do that for you. I think if it rotated that wrist-cam around to be on top that it can even simulate flipping them off with the other hand. Legendary!
Yes, meant to make him laugh more than anything. We've had some conversations envisioning us returning home from our mandatory days in the office only to find our robots hanging out on the porch together enjoying themselves and living the good life instead of doing chores
My dream:
"Good evening, sir. May I take your coat?"
"Dinner will be ready in about 20 minutes. Your guests said they will be arriving very shortly"
"May I serve you a drink while you relax in the sitting room?"
The reality:
"Good morning sir. Would you care for some assistance getting out of bed?"
"Please let me know if I can give you any help with your morning routine."
"Your low salt, heart healthy high fiber breakfast is ready now, and I have all your pill bottles lined up on the table for your approval."
That video at the refrigerator suggest that you might be able to get Nori to pose as you described as he passes and raise a Heineken in the other hand.
It’s built with cheap servos. It’s like all those jerky motion arms people build in school but never use in real life.
The form factor is good which is why multiple companies are building in that form factor. The arm motion will be like a 90 year old with mild Parkinsons. Watch the videos closely and you will notice the issue.
Neat vision, but I can only imagine this thing literally fucking everything up. Like, knocking shit off my table, setting my kitchen on fire, bumping into things like an idiot.
Not sure who the market is here apart from SF tech bros with money to burn.
Got it, sooo.. SF tech bros. I think that humanoid robots are interesting but the real innovation and product-market fit will come figuring out how to do menial household chores (folding clothes is still very much unsolved, for example) as opposed to an ultra-generalized robot that can "do anything."
Yep. If we're dependent on SF tech-bros to build useful robots we're already screwed. The Chinese robots can literally run circles around anything I've seen come out of the US. Maybe ours are not public. Don't count on that because in SV if you have an idea that might work, like this one, you're publicizing it if only to slurp up VC money before your company fails.
The biggest problem is they are using RC style servos. This is why all the arm motions are jerky and lack precision.
What this means: No force feedback on positioning. Jerky motion due to actuator steps. Limited precision. Terrible slow motion control performance. Fast movements will look better. Inability to solve problems with software.
Basically think of all the joints like those cheap thermal camera screens that are at 320 x 240 resolution. For rough work or finding some sort of oddity your good, but anything precise you need to spend real money. It's a pretty cool toy, but don't go buying this expecting that much.
Looks cool.
Can you be up front about its real capabilities. Are these videos of it eg tidying up real or just staged / cherry picked?
If you let it loose in a messy room or stirring something in a kitchen, what are the genuine results you would expect in the wild?
We’re all used to seeing things like Atlas back flipping but then can’t do anything in a real environment. Just curious how this fits in and what the success / fail rate is.
That video of it folding clothes would seem to hint at that. It's only able to awkwardly throw it into a pile, but they still included it. It's clearly a very cool project, but it suggests the claimed capabilities are more show than substance.
Where are you guys in SF? Would love to come see it. Mostly interested in seeing the speed of action (what multiple is the video replay at, etc.) and looking at center-of-mass etc. issues. I have a pretty straightforward use-case in a home. The Dreame we have in the living room is pretty good at avoiding most obstacles, but I usually have an LLM-based agent review the image automatically and either send out the vacuum or suggest moving things that would foul it up. Works great. Obviously substituting with a humanoid capable of reaching ground height things and picking up children's toys etc. would be great.
I'd want to bolt it with a mount to the wall when not in use because it needs to be climb-resistant for children during the daytime when I don't need it functional but there is a solid 8 hour 2200->0700 window when no one will be in the living room and speed is not an issue.
I was talking to my wife about this device and actually the wheeled form factor and (probably) no control software for balance is a feature for our use-case because when the Unitree G1 or whatever falls over the result is catastrophic. The balance control software attempts pure insanity and will likely kill a child nearby.
Wow, I have the exact same use case. Just move stuff off the floor so my vacuum robot can run and my life will improve 3-4x. Easy $2000 buy.
The matic is being sold as one with better obstacle avoidance and I have no doubt it does but the point is I want the obstacle out away and the floor cleaned underneath.
Having stuff moved off the floor for your robot vacuum will make your life 4 times better?
Website absolutely kills my S21U/Edge phone to view. Shame, this looks super cool. I'll check it out on my laptop later when I have a moment. Price seems enticing too.
honored to welcome another nori* business, alongside
- nori.ai (ai health coach)
- heynori.com (ai family hub)
- nori inc (soil based carbon sequestration)
- noriagentic.com (that's us, ai cloud infrastructure)
and my personal favorite
- nori.co (makers of 'The Nori Cloud' a clothes steamer, as seen on Oprah's Favorite Things)
My question would be how riffable is it? I don't have 10-20k to drop on a robot. I work for co-ops so while I make good money(90k~ pretty good!) its less than I could make else where but the trade off is I have more time to build random stuff. 2k is the price point for me where I might buy a big thing every so many years, teaching this to play board games, making new hands for it, teaching it to clean etc would be fun and at a price point that works for me. I would probably want a suction attachment for the fingers so it could handle cards and other flat tokens but that seems simple enough to build given the 3d models for printing are included.
I could see myself printing all sorts of costumes for it and using it as an ad hoc characters for tabletop games or as a spare bandmate if I ever finish my synth.
"We make money by selling the hardware for $1,688, with optional paid software on top."
The software would have to be quite good and also affordable for me to consider it, as all subscriptions are liabilities. I might one day want my robot to go with me to a show or to do something meaningful. Whenever that happens I will NOT be held hostage by software and will either source my own software or replace parts of the hardware till something works before I keep throwing money at a bad service. I would prefer to just have a good vendor supported software that I don't have to think about but I have trust issues. Privacy would be a huge concern, I can't have this in my garage lab with all my stuff being sent back to your servers for computer vision tasks etc.
I'm confused, is this a research device, hobby/tinker item, or consumer product?
I don't mean to be negative, but making a sustainable business on a hardware race to the bottom sounds challenging.
I'd be curious to to know from others here, what in-home tasks do people think they'll really be able to automate with any of the various bimanual or humanoid robot platforms that seem to be going around?
Nothing, none of these are good enough to do any home tasks reliably. These are all research/hobbyist devices that won't be interesting for another 5-10 years. Probably a bunch of fun to play around with though.
RPi5 seems a bit underpowered for all the sensors & control and offloading to a computer through wifi seems problematic. A Jetson Orin Nano would seem to be a better choice for a robot. Unfortunately Nvidia recently substantially increased the prices for their jetson devkits due to component shortages (DRAM,storage, etc), and what was $250 now costs $499 :(
None of the videos on website say how much are they speed up (or not), and is robot teleoperated or running autonomously.
This is cool! As someone who's built based off of old Roomba platforms and other models, I feel like this looks pretty fun and a good price point. What do you think the next version will target? Will you stay educational and low price point? Targeting some other usecases?
Love the design and freedom of this! Curious what the business model of this is to make the company sustainable. Asking that because I was part of the K-scale labs community and sad to see it shut down due to the competition with low-cost chinese robots
Is there a term for the design style of the plastic panels? I've been seeing it more often, for instance the robot wheeled base looks like an Amazon Delivery Van. Hidden screws, 45degree angles but with soft corner bends.
> Our open SDK includes teleoperation and demonstration tools
How is teleoperation anything more than a glorified puppet master pulling the strings or a radio controlled toy car?
It's higher latency than pulling strings. Until we get on device AI, humanoid robots will not be useful.
At this point, I think with the speed of AI development, the AI will be designing it's own body. It'll be ready to do that before humans figure out how to produce useful bodies.
Humanoid on wheels might be the winning form factor.
Jetsons!
Can you speak to the tradeoffs of high ratio servers vs QDD motors? Is it power or long term life?
I can see me doing so many things with this.
awesome!
Could it put small to medium sized packages in a package room of a condo?
Hopefully upto 24" in any dimension and 5-10 lbs(and ignore the others it can't handle)?
The set up of the small room: three stacked total height 5' rack shelves on both sides and a 2' wide passage in the middle.
Not saying off the shelf but how hard would it be to teach it how to do that?
Congratulations! That price point is really tempting. I look forward to reading more about this robot.
1. Does this require internet connectivity? If Nori goes out of business, can we keep using these?
2. Is the app distributed as an APK outside of the Play Store? Does it have any hard requirements on GMS that would prevent users of degoogled devices from using it?
3. Is every function available through the app possible to perform or recreate with the open SDK? Is this robot (now, and in the future) going to be accessible to technically competent folks who don't own a smartphone at all?
4. Is there a privacy policy on your website for the robot itself? Is there any telemetry? What kind? Will it be recording me without me asking it to? Is the software that ships on it totally open source?
Cool project! I might be quite interested, depending on how much it respects user freedoms and privacy.
Poor buddy looks like he's got the shakes
Can it climb stairs on a multi level house?
The site is broken can’t see much, but it would be great to know or show list of the components or BOM, as from experience, some companies cheap on certain sensors/motors etc.
A robot can reasonably cost $5000, don't break your back or your health.
Its main responsibility will be to stand in my front window and make the JO sign when my neighbor drives by
Based on the video evidence with the eyes widening down the page I suspect that this robot can do that for you. I think if it rotated that wrist-cam around to be on top that it can even simulate flipping them off with the other hand. Legendary!
Yes, meant to make him laugh more than anything. We've had some conversations envisioning us returning home from our mandatory days in the office only to find our robots hanging out on the porch together enjoying themselves and living the good life instead of doing chores
My dream: "Good evening, sir. May I take your coat?" "Dinner will be ready in about 20 minutes. Your guests said they will be arriving very shortly" "May I serve you a drink while you relax in the sitting room?"
The reality: "Good morning sir. Would you care for some assistance getting out of bed?" "Please let me know if I can give you any help with your morning routine." "Your low salt, heart healthy high fiber breakfast is ready now, and I have all your pill bottles lined up on the table for your approval."
That video at the refrigerator suggest that you might be able to get Nori to pose as you described as he passes and raise a Heineken in the other hand.
Why would you price your hardware so low? if this is as good as a customer would imagine, pricing should start around $20,000.
It’s built with cheap servos. It’s like all those jerky motion arms people build in school but never use in real life.
The form factor is good which is why multiple companies are building in that form factor. The arm motion will be like a 90 year old with mild Parkinsons. Watch the videos closely and you will notice the issue.
Neat vision, but I can only imagine this thing literally fucking everything up. Like, knocking shit off my table, setting my kitchen on fire, bumping into things like an idiot.
Not sure who the market is here apart from SF tech bros with money to burn.
Well, hackers, for one.
You know: like the first word in this forum's name.
> hackers, for one
Got it, sooo.. SF tech bros. I think that humanoid robots are interesting but the real innovation and product-market fit will come figuring out how to do menial household chores (folding clothes is still very much unsolved, for example) as opposed to an ultra-generalized robot that can "do anything."
Yep. If we're dependent on SF tech-bros to build useful robots we're already screwed. The Chinese robots can literally run circles around anything I've seen come out of the US. Maybe ours are not public. Don't count on that because in SV if you have an idea that might work, like this one, you're publicizing it if only to slurp up VC money before your company fails.
FYI: I backed off the page after about 5 seconds because the scrolling is unusable.
The scrolling in Firefox on Linux was abysmal.