Martinez, California: A Different Kind of Robotics Innovation
Martinez, California is about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get while still being in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perched on the northeast side of the bay, the small town is home to Hello Robot, a startup that is itself also far removed from the maximalist promises of its robotics rivals located 45 miles to the south.
Hello Robot released the fourth iteration of its home assistance robot, Stretch, last month. And we could even call it a humanoid robot. While Stretch has a vaguely human torso and sensor-adorned head, his telescoping arm has a pair of pincers, and he moves on a heavy, omnidirectional wheeled base.
When Stretch’s batteries run out, lights around his “eyes” glow – “he looks angry,” jokes company engineer Blaine Matulevich.
Focused on Real-World Application
Hello Robot, founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, former head of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, isn’t building a base model or promising to take over every job a human can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something many other robots don’t do: work in real homes, with real people, at a time when most are behind glass in laboratories.
It’s vital. While the latest advances in artificial intelligence promise more capabilities for robots, useful training data is lacking. And as simulation improves, investors are increasingly focused on deployment.
“Companies that deploy first accumulate site-specific recovery loops and workflow tolerances that no competitor can buy or synthesize,” Bullhound Capital wrote in an industry report released last week. “In robotics, the gap is not only intellectual property, but also operating hours accumulated under actual responsibility.”
Another Type of Incarnation
Image credits:Hello Robot
Keith Platt, a Georgia investor who now sits on Hello Robot’s board, invested in the company after accepting Stretch as a roommate. Platt became quadriplegic in 2021, able to control only parts of his shoulders, neck and head. He began exploring adaptive technology and, in 2024, began working with Hello Robot, which has an occupational therapist on team to support its work with Platt and others with similar conditions.
Platt controls his Stretch using a voice-activated iPhone app; he can task it with moving autonomously somewhere in his house, then take direct control to manipulate objects and complete tasks. One deceptively simple project was figuring out how to get Stretch to serve him a protein shake for breakfast, which normally requires the help of another person.
“When we started this activity, it took me independently – without anyone – it took almost two hours,” Platt told TechCrunch. “But I was going to stick with it. In a few minutes I could drink the whole shake and put it back on the counter.”
Being dependent on others is challenging, both physically and emotionally, Platt says. Anything he can do to regain his independence – like putting on or taking off his reading glasses, or brushing his teeth himself – “is huge.” Not just for him, but also for the people who care about him.
He predicts it would be “life-changing” for families if robotic assistants could enable people with limited mobility to be able to safely spend a day at home, allowing their family members to work independently or leave the house without hiring a professional caregiver.
Stretch leaves the factory with limited autonomy; focusing on having a human in the loop is intentional. “Having control is a characteristic – we want to embody that in the robot,” Matulevich said.
And, Platt points out, he’s not worried about Stretch falling if he makes a mistake.
The Challenge of Robotics Hardware
Despite all the money poured into startups designing brains for robots, their bodies still leave a lot to be desired. Even though components are becoming cheaper, the state of the art continues to produce heavy limbs that require active, high-energy balancing. A robotic hand and arm weigh much more than a human’s, and the physics are unforgiving.
When robots make mistakes, they damage things around them. A startup, Bot Company, is being sued by a San Francisco Airbnb owner who claims the company rented his apartment to work on its robot, which scratched furniture, broke appliances and chipped bathroom tiles.
“The state of hardware today is actually terrible from a ‘I want to have robots instead of my parents’ perspective,” Mahi Shafiullah, a postdoctoral researcher working on robotic hands at the University of California, Berkeley, told TechCrunch. He remembers industrial robots in his lab accidentally hitting a plastic kitchen playset they were supposed to handle carefully.
Shafiullah ultimately used the third generation of Hello Robot’s Stretch as part of his doctoral research at New York University. The models he helped develop with Stretch won the award for best demonstration at least one year at the Computer Vision And Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference.
Hello Robot doesn’t promise that Stretch will have the complexity or abilities of the humanoid robots that love the Valley, but its simpler design could make it more powerful. Edsinger compares his company to Waymo, which became the leading provider of self-driving cars by focusing first on safety (although money helped).
One of the leaders in this field, 1X, received a lot of attention last year when it unveiled a humanoid robot, Neo, that people could buy to do household chores. The company says it has sold all 10,000 Neos it plans to build this year, but so far none have been delivered.
“Hello Robot was very careful and really cared about this issue, because I think they designed it to address people first,” Shafiullah said. “And then they wonder where are the capabilities that they can fit within those limits?”
Hello Robot manufacturing workshopImage credits:Tim Fernholz
Return Home
Stretch 4 costs $30,000, which is a bit more than robots from Chinese manufacturers, although Edsinger notes that these often don’t come with sensors or software included, add-ons that end up driving up the price. He plans to make between 200 and 300 at the company’s headquarters in Martinez, with the first batch already sold out.
Edsinger wants to keep the robot accessible to hackers and researchers on a budget. One of the design criteria for Stretch is that it must be able to be shipped in a cardboard box via UPS or DHL. Once wooden crates and installation crews are required, costs increase and accessibility decreases.
Hello Robot’s customers include researchers using Stretch to test increasingly sophisticated AI brains, enterprise customers testing Stretch’s utility in environments such as data centers, and people working to develop home aids for people with disabilities.
The combination of the robot’s comprehensive sensor suite, physical capabilities and safe operations could make it a candidate to fulfill the hopes of physical AI enthusiasts.
“The algorithms may be there, but the data is not, and data is actually 80 percent of the ingredient that matters,” Shafiullah said.
Having a robot that can safely collect this data is another step forward. And Hello Robot intends to continue iterating. Lessons from the Stretch 4 rollout promise to be incorporated into the company’s next robot, which could lower the price and increase the capabilities enough to realize a vision of robot-human collaboration in the home.
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