MahiShafiullah

Have you seen our logo? https://dobb-e.com/mfiles/logo.svg

1. They have very detailed guides on the hardware here [0], which should tell you a lot of information you may need to know.

2. However, I think a large part of the price tag is really the cost of R&D, and once this gets out of prototype stage and goes into mass production price is bound to come down a lot. Compared to a lot of other robots, $20K is much cheaper. For example, compare Boston Dynamic's robot dog, Spot, which is around $200K iirc.

3. But that's also why we need more projects like Dobb-E on these robots! Without the right "apps" home robots will never catch on properly to get to the point of mass-production.

[0] https://docs.hello-robot.com/0.2/stretch-hardware-guides/doc...

Indeed! In fact, I have a project [0] from last year that uses a GPT-style transformer to address that exact issue :) However, it’s hard to go far outside simulations in real home robotics without a good platform, out of which efforts came Dobb-E.

[0] https://mahis.life/bet/

Absolutely, I personally think of myself as a home robot person through and through :)

As for continued contribution, right now the plan is to help get the community on-boarded, and just keep building on the platform. As you can tell, the policy class is pretty bare-bones, the in-home navigation system needs work, and we aren’t taking ANY advantage of the recent generative AI boom. All of those need to change if we want a real robot butler :)

But that’s why we open source things, right? What’s a mountain for one team is a feather for the community.

Thank you! We tried to keep things as simple as possible on the policy side, but definitely there is a lot more room for innovation to go from 81% to 99%, like using temporal information and global structure of the task.

It is actually part of a different project I’m working on! Handing off is still slow, so it needs more engineering, but hopefully it will get there soon :)

Hi all! Author here, happy to answer any of your questions!

Our goal is to get more robotics and AI researchers, engineers, and enthusiasts to get out of labs and into homes, so we open sourced everything!

I also submitted a Show HN with more details that unfortunately didn’t get much traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38453047