Show HN:Matic Robot – A privacy-preserving autonomous home robot built w/ Rust
5.5 years ago, we started building an autonomous home robot with these goals:
* Reliable autonomy — no user interventions, it should just work
* Everything on the device — no cloud storage or compute, robot-to-app data through local WiFi
* Usefulness — solve a genuine problem that will impact real people
To achieve this, we
* wrote the robot's software stack in Rust
* used only RGB cameras and Mics as input — humans can navigate with only these sensors, so why can’t a robot?
* developed SLAM and computer vision algorithms that run on-device, in real time, with centimeter-level precision and semantic understanding
* gave our robot a purpose — started with floor cleaning allowing us to develop specialized hardware for vacuuming and mopping w/o chewing up wires or getting stuck.
We're a small team of <50 people singularly focused on building something that we’ve all dreamed about: a mobile indoor robot that solves a real problem without jeopardizing our privacy. We're still developing Matic and iterating, but we’re proud of what we’ve built so far.
Let us know what you'd be interested to learn! We'll also answer questions here and look forward to your feedback :)