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Show HN: Dobb·E – towards home robots with an open-source platform

Mizza
19 replies
1d1h

Love the initiative. I'll get one once this starts mature.

Seeing things like this makes me think how badly companies like GE, Maytag, etc. all dropped the ball. Rather than innovating on making peoples lives easier - liberation from domestic toil - they just focused on squeezing out every penny by making Chinese crap with a brand name sticker glued, selling worse versions of products invented in the 1950s.

Somebody, please, just make a robot which folds my damn laundry!

byteknight
16 replies
1d1h

Fun fact, the washing machine is credited with saving the most human work hours.

Now for the folding!

dingnuts
8 replies
23h25m

It occurred to me recently that, at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers, and to this day consider them to be a luxury.

The same cannot be said for washing machines. Everybody uses a washing machine. If you don't have one, you use a laundromat. Even the poorest do not wash their clothes by hand with a tub and washboard like the olden days.

This comment has no real "point." I just wanted to share what I think is an interesting observation on this topic.

adamjc
3 replies
22h46m

We have a dishwasher but rarely use it (only for parties, etc). Loading / unloading is surpringly time-consuming, imho washing by hand is quicker.

Something I'd consider doing if I was single would be to have two smaller dishwashers, and alternate them, and leave the clean ones in the dishwasher...

Mizza
1 replies
22h42m

I've looked into this and they do actually make these. Same size as a normal dishwasher, but has two separate compartments of half the size. I wanna just skip the whole process and have my cabinets clean them though.

etrautmann
0 replies
21h43m

kinda of the same thing isn't it? this just changes the definition of the cabinet to those two compartments.

MPSimmons
0 replies
21h33m

It probably depends on the size of the household as well as the food prep habits. In a dense urban landscape without much kitchen, a dishwasher makes less sense, given the amount of eating out, takeaway, and so on, probably decreasing the amount of dishes you have total as well.

etrautmann
2 replies
21h44m

I lived until last month without a dishwasher (as a NYC resident). It never seemed like that big of a deal. When moving, our only hard requirement for the new place was in-unit laundry.

dharmab
0 replies
20h48m

My parents had a dishwasher but always said it "didn't get the dishes clean" and used it as a drying rack instead.

I bought a house where the dishwasher was incorrectly installed causing odors to come through the sink. That led me down a rabbit hole of proper dishwasher installation, maintenance, loading and using rinse aid.

MY GOD! My parents were wasting their lives! My dishwasher cleans and dries two sinks worth with three minutes of effort!

danielbln
0 replies
21h37m

Before having a dishwasher: "Oh you don't need a dishwasher, in fact I find washing dishes by hand meditative!"

After: "You will remove my dishwasher from my dead cold hands"

JohnFen
0 replies
17h36m

at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers

Not just the poorest. About half of the places I've lived in the US didn't have a dishwasher, and only about 1/4 of those places were affordable for a low-income person.

In my experience, it largely depends on how recently the place was built/remodeled.

xanderlewis
3 replies
22h29m

And various economists (and others) have suggested that the invention of the washing machine was the most important step towards allowing women to enter the workforce.

jokethrowaway
2 replies
20h43m

Which society needed so we can we have twice as many people working and pay them half.

I think in an alternate timeline in which the washing machine is not invented, we would still send women to work.

The washing machine labour could have been solved with centralising washing as a society, in the same way we centralised childcaring.

The economic forces and the political propaganda were too strong.

colonCapitalDee
0 replies
20h6m

Spare us the conspiracy theories. Washing machines were invented because they're convenient, not because of "political propaganda". And we've already "centralized" clothes washing, it's called a laundromat.

calamari4065
0 replies
17h15m

The washing machine labour could have been solved with centralising washing as a society, in the same way we centralised childcaring.

Are you genuinely unaware of the laundry sweatshops in the early 1900s? Have you never even seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

We've done centralized laundry. It was sweatshop work and was pretty terrible for everyone involved. Today we have laundry pickup services, but it's too expensive for most people. Are you willing to pay $40 for a load of laundry? Because that's what you get without sweatshop labor.

Seriously, read up on early 1900s labor practices. The labor laws we have today are written in blood. A lot of women and children suffered gruesome deaths and disfigurement, lifelong illnesses and disabilities.

totetsu
0 replies
16h8m

So the invention of clothing in the first place was the biggest waste of human work hours.

riedel
0 replies
21h14m
jonathankoren
0 replies
19h41m

Never let a mention of the hard problem of manipulating nonrigid objects go pass without mentioning how antiscience senator Tom Colburn openly mocked the idea of a robot that could fold laundry.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/oklahoma-sen-tom-coburn-repo...

MahiShafiullah
1 replies
22h29m

Thanks for the words of encouragement! If I may ask, what is the level of "maturity" you expect before adopting a home robot? Clearly, a robot that can wash and fold laundry is already there, but what are the other necessary/sufficient qualities?

Mizza
0 replies
21h12m

I've never seen a robot that can wash and fold laundry! At least not one that I can have in my home.

I guess I need it to be actually useful without supervision - put socks away, or pick up dirty clothes and put them in hamper, or put dirty dishes from the living room next to the sink, tidy the place up a bit. I'm a hacker so I love the open nature of this project, but unless it's actually useful for something, I will have a hard time convincing the other member of this household to have a robot/vase-destroyer/fire-hazard prattling around the home.

Maybe it could have a vacuum cleaner on the base..?

isawczuk
12 replies
1d1h

Is there DIY guide to build similar robot?

$19k - https://hello-robot.com/ is a bit steep.

MahiShafiullah
6 replies
1d

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...

yardie
3 replies
23h0m

Do you think this could be adapted to smaller robot like this Pi-based XGO CM4[0]

I know they have different hardware but the end result is quite similar: a mobile robot with an articulated grabber. And seeing your prototype made me think of the robot dog.

[0] https://shop.elecfreaks.com/products/elecfreaks-cm4-xgo-robo...

EwanG
1 replies
21h20m

Compute on theirs is an Intel Nuc 8 (probably explains a decent part of the price). Appreciate the link to the more "hobbyist friendly" device you mentioned. I am thinking it might do well as a platform for light dusting around the house and other things to supplement a Robovac.

cchance
0 replies
21h3m

how does a 300-600$ PC explain a decent part of a 20000$ robot?

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
16h52m

Smaller robots are unfortunately limited in how much force/torque they can apply and how high they can reach, two factors that we found can severely limit the applicability of a home robot. As a result, unfortunately, we don't have much plans for extending to a smaller robot at this moment.

However, all of our designs are open source! So if you or someone else is interested, it could be a fun weekend project to design a "Stick" equivalent data collection tool for the XGO CM4. I would love to see how that turns out.

omeze
1 replies
11h34m

this is really awesome. $20k is just too high for a toy, but I'm reading through this to see if there's a way to get this to $2k

zo1
0 replies
5h29m

I know everyone here mostly knows this, but in LCoL areas (South Africa for me specifically), that $20K almost buys you an entire house that you can live in in near-perpetuity. Not only that, but I could hire low-skilled labor for 7200 hours for the same cost. Just thought I'd add a bit of 3rd-world perspective to the discussion.

avery17
2 replies
1d1h

It says right there its affordable though!

robotresearcher
0 replies
1d

That’s an order of magnitude less than a PR2 was.

numpad0
0 replies
2h44m

ABB Dual YuMi is 70k, so 14k is relllatively affordable. Robot parts are wicked expensive and bills rack up fast.

goodpoint
0 replies
18h58m

shockingly expensive

Tade0
0 replies
21h13m

It's slightly more than a Nao:

https://www.robotlab.com/store/robotlab-nao-school-starter-p...

Which has hilarious design issues like microphones and CPU both in the head, so they pick up fan noise and if you tell it to extend its hands forward it's going to eventually collapse - apparently to prevent the motors from overheating.

xanderlewis
7 replies
1d5h

Great name.

onionisafruit
2 replies
1d2h

I hope their user group is called dobb-e club and they have some kind of Corfu ‘06 tie in.

For those who aren’t up on British comedies, this is a Peep Show reference.

zaps
0 replies
1d

The secret ingredient is crime

Exoristos
0 replies
16h23m

Or, Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (SPEW).

smackay
1 replies
1d3h

What use is a household robot if you cannot hand it any clothes?

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
1d2h

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 :)

MahiShafiullah
1 replies
1d

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

Nition
0 replies
7h9m

You have given Dobb·E a sock!

startupsfail
7 replies
1d

There is slight optimization. You don’t need 3D printed parts for your reacher grabber data collection stick. Just use $5 iPhone microscope mount to attach the phone securely to your stick.

It’d be nice also to think of some common format that includes depth, calibration, trajectory and doesn’t require nonstandard software on an iPhone. Standard camera app/cinematic format could be one example, I think.

MahiShafiullah
6 replies
23h27m

Thank you for the suggestions!

1. I'm ordering a microscope mount right now! We went with 3D printing because we could get a very good coupling between the stick and the robot mount. See this figure for a comparison: https://i.imgur.com/vWopcFB.jpeg

2. Our dataset (and dataset export code) gives the depth as numpy files and trajectory information in a JSON file with calibration and trajectory information! The r3d export format from the Record3D app we used is simply a .zip file with renamed extension so we were ok with using it. Do you have suggestion as to which cinematic format you are thinking?

beiller
2 replies
20h25m

I think you will find openexr surprisingly well supported across many platforms.

MahiShafiullah
1 replies
19h44m

OpenEXR looks very interesting! Especially if OpenEXR can compress depth data nearly as efficiently as we can compress image data by making everything a video, it would be a game changer. For example, our RGB dataset is 814 MB right now while the RGB-D dataset is 77 GB, even though depth "just" adds one new channel to our data.

startupsfail
0 replies
19h38m

Yes, that’s another thing. When Apple is recording RGBD in a cinematic format, it is tiny.

startupsfail
1 replies
19h46m

Yes, Record3D is an option. The problem with it, you’ll never get large scale data in the format recorded by a custom app. If you use some standard app and format that is used by general public, there is a bit higher chance. For the iPhone with the depth sensor cinematic format from the standard camera app seem to contain depth/RGB/traj. Maybe a candidate format. Also it’s much easier to operate standard camera app.

In a longer term the stick is likely not needed too. Ideally you’d want a human demonstrating with regular human tool, like pliers to generalize.

This is a particular mount that I’ve used. https://www.amazon.com/Starboosa-Smartphone-Microscope-Unive...

It’s pretty solid, but it doesn’t open completely, so you need to disassemble and reassemble the stick to put it on (which is not that difficult).

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
16h57m

For the iPhone with the depth sensor cinematic format from the standard camera app seem to contain depth/RGB/traj. Maybe a candidate format. Also it’s much easier to operate standard camera app.

I agree with you there. My impression was that the cinematic format is closed, unlike .r3d which is a bunch of open format files in a .zip. Do you know whether Apple has published the specs for the cinematic video format anywhere, or if there are there good libraries for handling it?

saulrh
0 replies
15h38m

Also look into the file formats that the robotics community use, stuff like rosbag and MCAP. These are formally more like point clouds than cinematic video captures and they won't integrate well with the video-processing side of things, but if you're dumping depths and trajectories from numpy and shuttling them to other robotics stuff then they might be a better fit than a 3d video format. In particular, if you end up adding anything other than video-like data streams - temperature, internal estimates from SLAM, etc - you'll have a much better time adding it to an mcap or rosbag than you would trying to shoehorn it into a video stream format.

owenpalmer
5 replies
19h43m

It's like Dobby from Harry Potter!

advael
3 replies
18h48m

Truly an awful choice of name

owenpalmer
2 replies
17h51m

Robot slavery

kevinmershon
0 replies
11h15m

to be fair, that's what robot means etymologically

advael
0 replies
17h13m

A slavery justified in the narrative by being a kind of sapient creature that simply naturally prefers slavery. And named after the one who wanted freedom due to, supposedly, being a weird exception to boot

onionisafruit
0 replies
16h17m

I thought it was a peep show reference based on all the POV training videos.

Then again I read Harry Potter to my kids about 20 years ago and don’t remember much from it.

pydry
4 replies
23h51m

There didnt seem to be any bathroom videos. Can it clean a bathroom? If not, what are the impediments to doing that currently?

jameshart
2 replies
21h51m

One of the problems with home-cleaning robots is how to keep the cleaning robot clean.

You don't want the same grabber that's scrubbing the toilet and picking up your dirty laundry to also be picking up your kids' toys, or packing away your groceries, let alone preparing food.

kaibee
1 replies
21h29m

Actually, this is why it's such a great business opportunity, see you have to buy a 2nd robot that cleans 1st robot and then a 3rd robot to clean the 2nd and so on.

More seriously, Stretch actually looks pretty straight forward so I could imagine a combo-charging/dock/cleaning station where it can swap tools (ie, grab a vacuum, drop off mop, etc) and get cleaned by the cleaning station. Also once the robot is in a more finalized version, its not unthinkable to make one that is waterproof enough to go through a carwash type device.

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
19h35m

Tool usage is one of the next ideas we would like to explore; because, if you think about it, the reacher-grabber that is currently used as an end-effector is just another tool.

If we can switch between tools quickly we can possibly unlock a wide range of applications: imagine a robot that can switch arms from a whisk to a spatula to a duster to to a mop all over the course of preparing a meal, and then switch to a screwdriver or a wrench for fixing something afterwards. Will take work to design modular parts like that, but the end result can be quite exciting indeed.

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
23h34m

Water!

Our robot-and-phone setup is not very safe around liquids haha. Hopefully the hardware experts among us can solve that problem sooner than later.

We are also working on learning multi-stage skills, and early results are promising (See section 4.1 on the paper). However, with multiple steps the chances of failure also goes up, so that's something we will have to make more robust :)

fudged71
3 replies
21h58m

This is brilliant.

Are considering crowdsourcing the data from more people? It looks fun, and could save me time in the future, so I think this could be worth doing

MahiShafiullah
2 replies
21h29m

Thank you!

Yes, we have considered launching an open source effort to scale up the data, perhaps to be comparable to what Google has collected through paid tele-operators [0]. What do you think would be the right incentive structure for everyday volunteers to participate in this effort?

[0] https://everydayrobots.com/thinking/rt-1-robotics-transforme...

pbronez
1 replies
21h0m

Privacy would be a big part of it. Video of my home could potentially contain lots of private information. How is that risk minimized?

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
19h57m

We don't want any private information, so currently we are manually going over every new demo to make sure private data (face, hands, any other identifying information) doesn't get included in the dataset. Pretty hard to "blitzscale" this way, but I personally think doing it right is more important.

GaggiX
3 replies
1d3h

Wow the model architecture seems extremely simple, very cool project.

MahiShafiullah
2 replies
1d2h

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.

GaggiX
1 replies
1d1h

Another limitation here is that the model is regressive, so for example if a task was to pick up one bottle out of two and the demos showed 50/50 of picking up one than the other, the model would output the mean even though it is not meaningful.

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
1d1h

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/

rexreed
2 replies
21h24m

Looks awesome. The Hello Robot shown is fairly pricy. (From the site: "A Fully Integrated Mobile Manipulator for $19,950").

What are the options to do similar manipulations for lower cost on a robotic unit?

MahiShafiullah
1 replies
19h13m

I discuss this a little bit on another thread: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461559)

But the tl;dr is that building prototypes is pricey, and the cost should definitely come down once the community moves from prototyping to mass-producing robots.

Hello Robots (the company behind the Stretch robot we're using) is also trying to bootstrap and build a sustainable product rather than blitzscaling and burning out fast [0, 1, 2] for which I respect them a lot. It's all too common of a story in robot world where have a great company showing lots of promise and then a year or two later they shut down after burning through investor money. I don't want to see it repeat.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/25/mayfield-robotics-ceases-p...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18682780/jibo-death-serve...

ranting-moth
0 replies
7h3m

I'm no marketing expert. But I'd think the majority of those who have an extra $20k to splash on a home robot are not the type of people who want to buy a prototype for hacking.

cyberax
2 replies
22h53m

Can you train it to attack home invaders? Ideally chanting: "Exterminate! Exterminate!"

MahiShafiullah
1 replies
22h45m

Not in our plans anytime soon, sorry :) We're focusing on home robots right now instead of rather unsettling space mutants.

Obscurity4340
0 replies
19h56m

Iteration is key

asow92
2 replies
1d1h

Master has presented Dobb·E with open-source, Dobb·E is free!

eutopian
0 replies
1d

lol

codetrotter
0 replies
1d

Perfection!

Sander_Marechal
2 replies
7h35m

The site seems to be totally broken at the moment (Firefox on Linux). It appears the main video (197.mp4, NS_BINDING_ABORTED) and their CSS framework (bulma.min.css, MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT) don't load.

antonhag
1 replies
7h20m

fwiw, works on my machine (linux+ff). No failed requests in inspector.

Sander_Marechal
0 replies
1h8m

It works on my machine now too

twoodrow
1 replies
1d2h

Hey there! Thank you for sharing; this is really inspiring.

Do you and/or anyone else who contributed have specific plans or desires for continuing to contribute to the home robot space?

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
1d1h

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.

snihalani
1 replies
20h40m

good stuff Mahi. please commercialize this and visit us in Bay Area!

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
19h11m

Thank you Suren! It will get there when it gets there and so will I :) I do miss you folks, though.

praveen9920
1 replies
19h55m

Can it handle any weights on its own? Carrying stuff is definitely one important task that could be useful for lot of people.

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
19h48m

The robot can carry small weights on its own, yes, although it's way more stable when the arm is retracted closer to the body.

Pick-and-place style problems are one of the earliest tried on our robot platform, Hello Stretch, which is why this project doesn't spend too much time on it. You may enjoy something like the OVMM project [0] which focuses entirely on open-vocabulary pick-and-place problems: "Pick up $A from $B and put it in $C".

[0] https://ovmm.github.io/

eutopian
1 replies
1d

I guess Dobb·E is a house elf after all.

jessmartin
0 replies
23h52m

Love the name.

cchance
1 replies
21h5m

Why does it feel like it's moving in such jerky steps?

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
19h40m

Great observation!

Right now we rely on the out-of-the-box Hello Robots controller [0] implementing position control. Since our policy only predicts a single position into the future at a time, the motion ends up being either jerky and fast, or smooth and slow. Improving on the controller is probably one of the highest ROI improvements we can make moving into the future.

[0] https://github.com/hello-robot/stretch_body

KerrAvon
1 replies
17h49m

the linked website seems completely unusable for me in Safari

MahiShafiullah
0 replies
17h38m

I am sorry, what problems are you facing? I tested it with Safari on both my phone and laptop just now and couldn't find an issue, so I would really appreciate it if you can reply here or (more appreciated) email me with images etc. on the email listed on my profile.

I much appreciate your heads up, and thank you for taking your time on this.

upghost
0 replies
2h51m

Bravo! This is some great science and great hacking. Extremely refreshing to see right now.

throwitaway222
0 replies
22h46m

VB Automation for IRL.

tamimio
0 replies
1d13h

Awesome, looks interesting!

sklargh
0 replies
22h17m

I would give up my second car for a robot that could reliable transit a 120 year old house to do dishes and wash and fold laundry.

sheepscreek
0 replies
23h15m

Fantastic! Great to see a robotics framework that is no-frills (easily reproducible/DIY) and is immediately useful. Thank you for open-sourcing it.

lukevp
0 replies
13h43m

It’s so hilariously slow and jumpy, it moves like a cautious chipmunk! I’m sure it’s gonna be awesome but it is so MVP right now. Also those “houses” in the demo videos are like a grid. Whose house is perfectly clean all the time? My roomba has to adapt to lots of novel situations just to transit the floor.

filipezf
0 replies
18h45m

I was thinking on buying/building one robot like this to experiment. Can one fit more than one manipulator on it (so it could more easily do things like hang out clothes, or hold a glass of water and add ice)? More generally, how does the AI model would adapt to diverse robot morphologies?

dominicdoty
0 replies
2h11m

I don't think I've seen anyone else suggest it- the Comma Body might be an interesting platform for this. No manipulator unfortunately but a decent place to start.

https://www.comma.ai/shop/body

ReptileMan
0 replies
8h38m

I said back in the day that the real killer app for AI will be Rosie from the Jetsons. A robot that can clean, tidy, dust fold cloths etc 24/7 and free people completely from house chores will have absurdly fast pick up and market penetration. Good luck.