Hardware

Stretch (Hello Robot)

Stretch is a lightweight mobile manipulator from Hello Robot, combining a differential-drive base, a vertical lift, a horizontally telescoping arm, and a compliant wrist and gripper in a slim, human-friendly footprint. Its unusual prismatic kinematics keep cost, weight, and inertia low relative to arm-on-base designs, and Stretch 3 ships with an RGB-D head camera and open-source ROS 2 software. It is widely used for in-home assistive robotics and mobile manipulation research.

Why it matters for physical AI

Homes demand safe, affordable, and narrow robots more than dexterous ones; minimalist platforms like this test how much everyday utility careful hardware-software co-design can unlock.