Awesome project! What you've built is a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot, and since you are using gravity to keep the cables in tension it is a suspended cable-driven parallel robot. Using the four cables you are able to move a point in 3D space. I happen to know this because I wrote my phd on the accuracy of these types of robots and their kinematics. At that time Jean-Pierre Merlet was probably the most famous/prolific researcher on this topic (https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Jean-Pierre.Merlet/merlet_e...). You may also have heard of a company in Germany trying to commercialize this technology on a slightly bigger scale: https://redcablerobots.com/en/. There is also a conference on these types of machines in Europe: https://cablecon2027.sciencesconf.org/ the original being organized by Andreas Pott (another high impact sholar on this).
I have not worked in this field for many years but had a fun time learning about a very wide array of topics.
> Can it kill you? no probably not. The tension limit kicks in and lets the line out if you pull too hard.
Is there a physical safety? The anchors are attached to the wall, do they release with less tension than a human airway can withstand? I have experienced injuries that would prohibit me from exerting a "backpack" of force over my head.
There is a tension limit of 28 newtons on any single line. Beyond that, the motors release with a damped motion. This can be lowered, at the expense of payload capacity.
How far will they release? Is that physical or software? If the line is wrapped around my neck and anchored to the wall how does the motor releasing help me? I can see industrial applications but it seems like a dangerous thing to have in a home.
So it probably can't kill you with blunt force trauma but it could drop something toxic into your drink while you're in the other room. Which, you know, assumes some sort of hostile intent that a robot can't have on its own lol. So it can kill you but probably not accidentally.
If your adversary wants to murder you that badly, I doubt they're going to give up when they find out you don't have a Stringman wired up in your kitchen.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you should just have better survival instincts than a toddler and not let the line wrap around your neck. And if you do have toddlers, maybe keep them away from the hanging machine.
If that's the official stance, then this robot will kill people. You can't expect people to never leave a toddler in the same room with the robot, unless they fully realize the implications of having a killer robot at home. Otherwise the consumers are being deceived
Products in the real world need to be better than that
"Just let people be responsible for themselves" would work if we hadn't built a society that neutered everyone's ability to take care of themselves by gutting education systems and disconnecting people from political participation and social responsibility.
Tldr have you met people? There's a reason seat belt laws exist. If we're going to let companies sell things to this population we've fostered and not take our own responsibility, we have to put it on the companies.
A quick browse through any of the shock content subreddits will reveal a lot in terms of average people's understanding of risk.
https://youtu.be/AWig98GVIno?t=155 might be worth looking into with regards to the descending rod, to make its length controllable without taking up much space
Totally agree. I would love a roomba but I have a dog so clutter in the living room is inevitable even after a clean up. This bot could sync with the roomba (or other robot vacuums) to ensure a space / path is clear before it is vacuumed
Create a little station in one corner, and make the whole arm/pulley system able to switch the attachment/tool, so it can first pick up all the stuff, then change the tool to a vacuum, then once done, change a tool to a mop, and so on :) A N-in-1 system!
I made a big one for my garden. It is like a that scene in honey i shrunk the kids with Rick Moranis laying in that cantilevered flying cot thing but i use 2 high speed winches and some machined aluminum and the cabling sort of like an etch a sketch controls. I control it with the same usb gamepad that titanic sub imploded with. i can raise and lower myself about 4 feet to get inbetween the rows. It is pretty fun to play in too. I want to build a robot to get in it and then remotely control the whole thing. Its basically the same thing as the NFL spider cam but holds more because I'm a fatass and performs much worse. I used 12 foot 4x4s with concrete bases. Its about a 20 feet by 35 feet garden. My only real concern is the longevity of the cables, the hight im suspended at isn't really dangerous but i know i am not using the right cables for the winch. 3/16 in marine grade vinyl coated 4200 pound working load limit. my spools or whatever you want to call it is 6 inches im afraid theres too much tension on parts sometimes. I had an alternate design that used water as a ballast and you just pump or drain water to move around the grid but that was too ambitious for my lazy ass.
It's an interesting concept, but I think I'll hold out for the full-body humanoid version.
There is an undeniable allure to the idea of a bipedal chassis realizing I'm an inefficient drain on corporate resources, then stabbing me to death while I sleep due to a minor Terms of Service violation.
The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal. Ceiling mounted is actually a much more plausible option. Next most likely is something more like R2D2. A rolling garbage can with an arbitrary number of specialized appendages. Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.
Their benefit is they can operate in any space designed for a human without custom modification. No wires to get in the way with an assistant robot that interacts with the existing built world.
We've built zillions of machines to automate tasks previously done by humans (or animals) and how many times did we design something based on humans work? Roughly zeroish? People used to do laundry with wash basin and a river, now it's a metal cube. People wash dishes with a sponge and a towel but the machine is a metal cube. People would cook over burning wood and now it's a metal cube.
The difference is this humanoid is meant to be a bespoke “does everything” robot. The others are very purpose-built/particular. And with good reason of course, an “everything humanoid” is beyond a moonshot in 2026
I'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.
Rebuilding and replacing tools doesn't sound that big of an issue to be honest.
I'm starting from the assumption the vast majority of people won't want a robot in their home, even just on principle. Then most people will not need it to do every possible action an human does.
For the remaining people in the target, having adapted/compatible cabinets or furniture is probably less of an issue. If someone requires assistance for instance, they'll probably also don't want hard to access shelves or crazy weird stairs.
The same way people have started choosing furniture that can accommodate a roomba(RIP irobot), we'll adjust our newer homes to whatever makes sense when we get the next wave of home robots.
That’s a flawed assumption. Everyone wants a live-in bangmaid. They’re just normally too expensive. If you could buy one for 30k, they would fly off the shelves.
They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.
> once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.
That would be cool. But also a little scary if it has an onboard AI which, based on it's embodiment, decides to develop a cat-like personality. Pretty sure if my cat had a better world model and long-horizon planning, it would kill me in my sleep.
Why? If you're dead, then it stops getting food and pets. If you're dead, it'll eat your face off if your neighbors don't break in first because of the smell.
I agree from an engineering and cost perspective that matching the embodiment, degrees of freedom and performance to the use case tends to be optimal. But entertainment, fun and inspiration can also be economically valuable use cases - even if less common.
That said, there are use cases which require navigating environments built for humans and the adaptive flexibility to perform unpredictable tasks as a human proxy. And those robots will probably be broadly humanoid shaped.
Ish. Millions of years of evolution and other than snakes and their ilk, land-faring animals have legs. So bipedal with wheels on the feet is maybe optimal. The optimal number of arms I think is three. No "head" is strictly necessary. The interesting question is how do you train a three armed robot when there are few three armed people?
We might be at the beginning of a golden age for inventors. Robots of all shapes and sizes, with highly variable price points and specialization. Still, the first challenge for R2D2 is probably stairs.
> The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal
Based on what? Do you think humans evolved into what we are based purely on aesthetic? Of course it may be suboptimal, but given enough time and ingenuity, so could literally everything be. Not sure that should stop anyone.
Humans are def not designed optimally to live and work in a modern house or office. Don’t confuse “survived better than other animals in the Savannah 200 000 years ago” with modern env.
> Humans are def not designed optimally to live and work in a modern house or office
Agreed, those were designed by humans (mostly) for humans. I don't think we as a species "adapt to things" so much anymore, and instead we adapt our environment to us.
> Could certainly slowly strangle you in the cabling
Reminds me of the engineer who accidentally strangled himself with his contraption:
> He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). - "The Man Who Accidentally Poisoned the Planet Twice": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
"Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. "
Why humanoid though. I’d want the most efficient design to complete the task at hand. Even if the thing looks like a hybrid of an octopus meets Freddy Krueger
The world is already designed for the humanoid for factor. Instead of designing 1001 specialized robots, why not design one that can already use the stuff we have lying around?
A robot can fit in environments designed for humans, while still being enhanced.
For instance with wheels on the legs (so that the legs are used only for stairs or for stepping over obstacles) and with at least 3 arms. Only 2 arms are frequently insufficient for many tasks, when you do not have a mate to help you.
and no head with blinking eyes. A single 360° camera with a wiper blade, not to mention eyes on each hand if not finger. Although we're limited to thinking in single bodies. Maybe optimal is an 8 ft (2.5m) long tube with grippers on both ends, and they're just all coordinated together as one single being. Or maybe a Y shape. Actually, maybe a * shape. All legs. Hey, maybe that's why all the AI labs look like buttholes!
In non-murder tasks, humans are already obsolete. Our remaining economic value is solely alignment arbitrage, eg solving CAPTCHAs, murder, submitting 'human' papers, etc.
Given abliterated open models, Stringman is coming for our last remaining job!
I kind of want to try something like this for garden weeding. Put a small spinning blade instead of a grabber arm on it. Computer vision can identify any weeds popping up and it'll go over and cut them before they get too big/woody for the blades. The challenge would be dodging taller plants and probably the forces that the blade would put on it.
Why not use grippers to pull them? Probably more effective because there's no root to grow back from, shouldn't require too much force when they're small/the soil is damp, and you don't have to figure out torsion/"friendly fire" from a spinning blade.
I think the project difficulty grows at least 10x with all the dust, insects wind, pollen in the air and whatnot even assuming you hide it for bad weather and you have secured very stable mount points. It sure would be cool though.
Roundup is gross anywhere even in small amounts. If water and energy can be provided similarly to stringman, a heating element to deliver a small payload of boiling water usually suffices.
I like that this doesn’t require giving up human living space for another machine.
It hangs above the head — the space that is mostly unused. It pops in only when needed, and stows back otherwise. It’s also omni-present within the room.
In reality though, I think the cables will never work in a household situation. It's a interesting concept and I'm sure it was fun to build :) Makes me wonder what commercial application this would work for, I'm sure there's something out there that would benefit from this over waiting on humanoid tech
It seems like it will work well if you know you have a situation that fits well with the setup. Do you spend 4+ hours out of the house and this is in a large, rectangular room with no one walking through? Perfect.
Two people have mentioned garden applications, so maybe back yard and outside applications are where the creator needs to explore.
Though, I agree that my spouse would rather burn the house down than set this up in the living room where cables would be "ugly" and not match with our decor.
When I was 12, it was my job to pick up all the toys my much younger sibling had thrown around all house. I spent an hour every day doing that. I wish someone had gave something like this back then. It would save hundreds of hours
lol. I had much younger siblings too and have memories of pulling out the dust pan and broom if I had to clean after them. Luckily wasn’t my daily job, yikes!
Only widespread commercial application of cable robots I have seen is cameras in stadiums and concert venues.
I guess in most industrial use cases it makes more sense to have a robot stationary and move the parts around with conveyors. Doing it that way allows to pipeline and parallelize the manufacturing process. In contrast the large operating volume covered by cable robot needs to be served by single robot exclusively.
I've always thought they could be good in agriculture (can't pipeline the ground, after all). Dealing with wind would probably require a ~fully constrained 6 line system though.
Australia's $900-million-a-year greenhouse tomato industry currently relies on farmers pollinating by hand
“So we've managed to design a robot that pollinates greenhouse tomatoes.”
“It autonomously drives along the rows, finds flowers that are ready for pollination using artificial intelligence, and sends air pulses to vibrate the flowers in a very specific manner to imitate buzz pollination as performed by bumblebees.”
A fourth cable would allow you to keep the other three constrained up high, with fourth being to lower. Would require some close looped control to eliminate swaying though.
This really needs a way to pull the strings and bot out of the way when not in use.
Something like an extra string running along the edge of a wall that could “gather up” the diagonal strings and tuck them away on an edge or corner would make this a much easier impulse purchase.
I was actually just thinking about something like this this morning. Mainly because I was idly wondering if the kinematics would work with just 3 supporting cables. Intuitively, it seems like it should, but I haven't bothered to research it yet.
3 cables should work. Each cable length is a single parameter that defines a sphere around the mount, and the intersection of three spheres defines a point.
I suspect the reason they chose 4 is that 3 cables would limit you to a triangular region, so you’d only be able to access half the room.
Range of motion would be confined to the space beneath the triangle bounded by the three anchor points. Most spaces are rectangular, so bounding it to four corners would seem likely to give a more useful range of motion.
You can join two of the cables together that come from each corner unit into one. each unit - still with an eye hole in another corner - moves the cable left or right. With the opposite corner unit, you can pick X,Y on the ceiling. I'd put the third cable in the grabber, which can be used to lower it to the floor.
Probably if you went this way, you'd want to measure each ceiling cable so it is about X+Y length, or otherwise the slack needs to be held somewhere.
This is one less actuator than their system if I understand them, and they are not counting the gripper itself.
I've been wanting to build a cable robot for Halloween which flys a ghost around the front yard with a vision system that detects people passing by and the ghost floats towards them and follows them.
Awesome! Though I'm thinking that you can do MUCH MUCH more things with 2 grippers than with one. Has all been tried in terms of weight management to instead of having a motor in the air with a gripper, putting two motors on each end corner of the ceiling that can pull a line tethered to a (in the air) pulley system that grasps? You could then have say 4 lines to pull (1 left grip, 1 right grip, 1 to adjust both gripper's distance, 1 to rotate the in the air platform).
I was working on something similar, stoked to see this type of project making it out of the labs! The inspiration for most similar systems are industrial settings with automated bridge cranes which are fantastic, almost surgical when everything is symmetrical in the active environment.
Would more taut crossed wires and a descending line for the grabber (like the one at an arcade) solve the humans crossing wire path problem? Then it becomes separate x/y and z.
They compare it to a robotic arm, but they are a natural combination. Two arms, even, floating above it all, could scratch the dog, make breakfast, and maybe someday, fold a fitted sheet.
They designed the cables to go down into the room, instead of from the ceiling - seems like that is a deal breaker for most environments actually, because you need the whole room to have open space just to drop it to the floor all over.
They say they use 4 actuators, but if they only used 3, this problem would be solved.
Instead of independently controlling all four lines, you can join the lines leaving each corner unit and then just move the line left or right instead of reeling two different lines in and out. You still use the corner eye loops, and you use two cables that are X+Y in length. This allows you to pick a point on the ceiling. Then a third actuator and line in the gripper itself could lower itself to the floor.
If I understand what you're suggesting, wouldn't this result in a lot more swinging since the gripper would be suspended from a single point directly above it?
You seem to. That is a good point I hadn't considered - the tension from the sides holds it in place. Maybe we need to use a telescoping arm (which doesn't seem practical, I'm mostly joking). It might still work, but I imagine if you don't grab it on the first try, you may have to go back to the ceiling. And hope there are no strong drafts in the room.
EDIT: maybe lower it on three lines instead of one?
With the video, it is casually dropping things like clothes and toys into a bucket, so I'm not sure it would be a big deal. But you could also lower it via three lines instead of one, so there is something to counteract that.
I didn't understand if exactly this feature is available, but I think it would be a good idea to let the strings actually come off each motor completely when yanked hard. Interesting idea :)
Super smart but it's one of those ideas that hopefully gives someone else in this space another idea that leads to something that could mass scale and I would buy. Love the ingenuity though.
It seems like the kind of thing you would set up to run when you are not in the room. The cables appear to stay taut and out of the way when it's not running.
Their example of it being used to move items between robotics stations in an automated workshop seems far more widely-applicable than the in-home solution, which I imagine is primarily aimed at assisting people with physical disabilities rather than those of us who can easily bend down and pick things up without pain or exhaustion.
I built a big swing arm in my dorm, so I had two 40lb+ 21" CRT dangling free under some pulleys. Keyboard mouse space below. Then myself on a hammock chair, also swinging. Just a couple pieces of 2x4 reinforced with some angle iron, some door hinges, some cables & pulleys. It was really fun.
I've dreamed of having just a good 2d robot that can, like, hold a camera and pan. I saw Stringman here a couple of weeks ago & it's been hard to not thing about it! I don't own though, so, seems unlikely I'd commit, as alas the walls are not a simple white I can easily patch & paint. But so cool!
It's an interesting concept. If you scroll through the page you'll see it's actually pretty strong. The blanket pick up video should actually be the first video.
My fear is that a company that has the money to build and manufacture this will rip off the idea and use their resources to polish the concept. With a lot polish, this type of thing can be useful in certain environments.
Come on this is not up to the standard. Consumer product must be highly polished, it can be fully unfuncyional, but it needs to look good. This one is close to my 8 years old son's tape+random lego pieces...
Or perhaps I should say: what about safety? Not that any of the billionaire AI companies could have been created if they actually cared about (legal, mostly) safety ... so perhaps you should just go ahead and ignore it.
167 comments:
Hi there, I'm Nathaniel, the creator of this robot. Thanks for posting it :) If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Can it kill you? no probably not. The tension limit kicks in and lets the line out if you pull too hard.
Will it work in a room with a ceiling fan? usually its fine since you can lower the work area ceiling to exclude the fan.
Will it make my kids learn to not pick up after themselves? They never will anyways.
Awesome project! What you've built is a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot, and since you are using gravity to keep the cables in tension it is a suspended cable-driven parallel robot. Using the four cables you are able to move a point in 3D space. I happen to know this because I wrote my phd on the accuracy of these types of robots and their kinematics. At that time Jean-Pierre Merlet was probably the most famous/prolific researcher on this topic (https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Jean-Pierre.Merlet/merlet_e...). You may also have heard of a company in Germany trying to commercialize this technology on a slightly bigger scale: https://redcablerobots.com/en/. There is also a conference on these types of machines in Europe: https://cablecon2027.sciencesconf.org/ the original being organized by Andreas Pott (another high impact sholar on this).
I have not worked in this field for many years but had a fun time learning about a very wide array of topics.
> Can it kill you? no probably not. The tension limit kicks in and lets the line out if you pull too hard.
Is there a physical safety? The anchors are attached to the wall, do they release with less tension than a human airway can withstand? I have experienced injuries that would prohibit me from exerting a "backpack" of force over my head.
There is a tension limit of 28 newtons on any single line. Beyond that, the motors release with a damped motion. This can be lowered, at the expense of payload capacity.
How far will they release? Is that physical or software? If the line is wrapped around my neck and anchored to the wall how does the motor releasing help me? I can see industrial applications but it seems like a dangerous thing to have in a home.
FYI they said the tension limit is 28 newtons.
It takes about 38 newtons to lift a 4 litre bottle of milk.
It'll be okay.
So it probably can't kill you with blunt force trauma but it could drop something toxic into your drink while you're in the other room. Which, you know, assumes some sort of hostile intent that a robot can't have on its own lol. So it can kill you but probably not accidentally.
If your adversary wants to murder you that badly, I doubt they're going to give up when they find out you don't have a Stringman wired up in your kitchen.
"Any machine can be a blender if operated wrongly enough"
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you should just have better survival instincts than a toddler and not let the line wrap around your neck. And if you do have toddlers, maybe keep them away from the hanging machine.
If that's the official stance, then this robot will kill people. You can't expect people to never leave a toddler in the same room with the robot, unless they fully realize the implications of having a killer robot at home. Otherwise the consumers are being deceived
Products in the real world need to be better than that
the discourse in hacker news is turning into a neurodivergent, overdramatized concern trolling competition.
"Just let people be responsible for themselves" would work if we hadn't built a society that neutered everyone's ability to take care of themselves by gutting education systems and disconnecting people from political participation and social responsibility.
Tldr have you met people? There's a reason seat belt laws exist. If we're going to let companies sell things to this population we've fostered and not take our own responsibility, we have to put it on the companies.
A quick browse through any of the shock content subreddits will reveal a lot in terms of average people's understanding of risk.
No one is selling this, or am I mistaken?
As far as dyi projects go... This is harmless
https://youtu.be/AWig98GVIno?t=155 might be worth looking into with regards to the descending rod, to make its length controllable without taking up much space
How does it handle the change in slack over time as the cables naturally deform?
If I had this I could get a roomba. Does that make sense?
If I get this, could it carry my Roomba up stairs so it'll cover my whole house?
Totally agree. I would love a roomba but I have a dog so clutter in the living room is inevitable even after a clean up. This bot could sync with the roomba (or other robot vacuums) to ensure a space / path is clear before it is vacuumed
can it just carry around a normal vacuum? no need for wheels when you can fly
Create a little station in one corner, and make the whole arm/pulley system able to switch the attachment/tool, so it can first pick up all the stuff, then change the tool to a vacuum, then once done, change a tool to a mop, and so on :) A N-in-1 system!
I made a big one for my garden. It is like a that scene in honey i shrunk the kids with Rick Moranis laying in that cantilevered flying cot thing but i use 2 high speed winches and some machined aluminum and the cabling sort of like an etch a sketch controls. I control it with the same usb gamepad that titanic sub imploded with. i can raise and lower myself about 4 feet to get inbetween the rows. It is pretty fun to play in too. I want to build a robot to get in it and then remotely control the whole thing. Its basically the same thing as the NFL spider cam but holds more because I'm a fatass and performs much worse. I used 12 foot 4x4s with concrete bases. Its about a 20 feet by 35 feet garden. My only real concern is the longevity of the cables, the hight im suspended at isn't really dangerous but i know i am not using the right cables for the winch. 3/16 in marine grade vinyl coated 4200 pound working load limit. my spools or whatever you want to call it is 6 inches im afraid theres too much tension on parts sometimes. I had an alternate design that used water as a ballast and you just pump or drain water to move around the grid but that was too ambitious for my lazy ass.
If you don't put that on the internet for us to see...
Oh you’ve gotta send pics of this setup!
Yea this sounds insane. I want pics.
I would watch a video you made about this!
It's an interesting concept, but I think I'll hold out for the full-body humanoid version.
There is an undeniable allure to the idea of a bipedal chassis realizing I'm an inefficient drain on corporate resources, then stabbing me to death while I sleep due to a minor Terms of Service violation.
The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal. Ceiling mounted is actually a much more plausible option. Next most likely is something more like R2D2. A rolling garbage can with an arbitrary number of specialized appendages. Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.
Their benefit is they can operate in any space designed for a human without custom modification. No wires to get in the way with an assistant robot that interacts with the existing built world.
We've built zillions of machines to automate tasks previously done by humans (or animals) and how many times did we design something based on humans work? Roughly zeroish? People used to do laundry with wash basin and a river, now it's a metal cube. People wash dishes with a sponge and a towel but the machine is a metal cube. People would cook over burning wood and now it's a metal cube.
The difference is this humanoid is meant to be a bespoke “does everything” robot. The others are very purpose-built/particular. And with good reason of course, an “everything humanoid” is beyond a moonshot in 2026
Much smaller robots will co-exist in a world with humans a lot more smoothly than anything human shaped & sized.
I'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.
Rebuilding and replacing tools doesn't sound that big of an issue to be honest.
I'm starting from the assumption the vast majority of people won't want a robot in their home, even just on principle. Then most people will not need it to do every possible action an human does.
For the remaining people in the target, having adapted/compatible cabinets or furniture is probably less of an issue. If someone requires assistance for instance, they'll probably also don't want hard to access shelves or crazy weird stairs.
The same way people have started choosing furniture that can accommodate a roomba(RIP irobot), we'll adjust our newer homes to whatever makes sense when we get the next wave of home robots.
That’s a flawed assumption. Everyone wants a live-in bangmaid. They’re just normally too expensive. If you could buy one for 30k, they would fly off the shelves.
Everyone wants a perfect robot at a low cost.
Except it won't happen, so the amount of people wanting a pretty flawed and compromised yet expensive robot will be pretty low.
Just have to be compatible?
The xiaomi-robotics-1 concept is but one that seems very doable and very near term.
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
If the end-goal is robot maid, aka cooks and cleans for a household, it at minimum needs to handle stairs and uneven ground like gardens.
Something to get the laundry from each room, wash, dry, fold, put away.
Cut and cook ingredients then do the dishes.
Mow the lawn, water the plants and do basic weeding etc.
Maybe even climb a ladder to empty the gutters / clean windows.
A non-humanoid will never be able to accomplish that without dedicated implements.
Yes, once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.
They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.
> once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.
That would be cool. But also a little scary if it has an onboard AI which, based on it's embodiment, decides to develop a cat-like personality. Pretty sure if my cat had a better world model and long-horizon planning, it would kill me in my sleep.
Why? If you're dead, then it stops getting food and pets. If you're dead, it'll eat your face off if your neighbors don't break in first because of the smell.
> almost certainly suboptimal.
I agree from an engineering and cost perspective that matching the embodiment, degrees of freedom and performance to the use case tends to be optimal. But entertainment, fun and inspiration can also be economically valuable use cases - even if less common.
That said, there are use cases which require navigating environments built for humans and the adaptive flexibility to perform unpredictable tasks as a human proxy. And those robots will probably be broadly humanoid shaped.
Ish. Millions of years of evolution and other than snakes and their ilk, land-faring animals have legs. So bipedal with wheels on the feet is maybe optimal. The optimal number of arms I think is three. No "head" is strictly necessary. The interesting question is how do you train a three armed robot when there are few three armed people?
How does R2D2 climb stebs?
ED 209 Can't.
Well if your legs trunnions were coffee cup lids, than stairs would pose an issue too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFMJ514lz5w
The ED 209 is still cool, and only outclassed on screen by the T-800. =3
same way Daleks do
We might be at the beginning of a golden age for inventors. Robots of all shapes and sizes, with highly variable price points and specialization. Still, the first challenge for R2D2 is probably stairs.
It’ll be like phones. All kinds of whacky fun designs, before converging on a single black rectangle. Robots will all be flat black rectangles
Interstellar really got it right with TARS then.
The big benefit of humanoids is that they can be trained from captured human actions (egocentric datasets made by humans).
Do we really have to capture the humans? Legal says that introduces a whole slew of issues.
> captured human actions
Or just some dude on remote. (Get in the robot, Shinji!)
> The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal
Based on what? Do you think humans evolved into what we are based purely on aesthetic? Of course it may be suboptimal, but given enough time and ingenuity, so could literally everything be. Not sure that should stop anyone.
Humans are def not designed optimally to live and work in a modern house or office. Don’t confuse “survived better than other animals in the Savannah 200 000 years ago” with modern env.
> Humans are def not designed optimally to live and work in a modern house or office
Agreed, those were designed by humans (mostly) for humans. I don't think we as a species "adapt to things" so much anymore, and instead we adapt our environment to us.
>Do you think humans evolved into what we are based purely on aesthetic
A modern house is a very different environment to the savannas of Africa.
> Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.
We built the world for us, not for the most sensible robot.
So for generalized solutions, a good biped will have some advantages.
I'm sure with a little ingenuity you could rig up stringman to stab you to death!
Getting it to be forceful enough would be a bit interesting. Could certainly slowly strangle you in the cabling.
It could also strangle you super fast, see here; Red Cable Robots Video[1]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIr0ZtVVnBA
Depending on how high your ceilings are, dropping items from height could be quite uncomfortable.
Drop a sharp item on you from a sufficient height? :/
Gravity assist...
Honestly I had been thinking more in terms of a crossbow/harpoon type attachment. Fire, rewind, tension up, fire again etc.
> Could certainly slowly strangle you in the cabling
Reminds me of the engineer who accidentally strangled himself with his contraption:
> He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). - "The Man Who Accidentally Poisoned the Planet Twice": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
That's straight out of Douglas Adams.
"Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. "
Poison tipped syringe!
This reads very futuramaesque
Slow and horrible, please.
Why humanoid though. I’d want the most efficient design to complete the task at hand. Even if the thing looks like a hybrid of an octopus meets Freddy Krueger
The world is already designed for the humanoid for factor. Instead of designing 1001 specialized robots, why not design one that can already use the stuff we have lying around?
A robot can fit in environments designed for humans, while still being enhanced.
For instance with wheels on the legs (so that the legs are used only for stairs or for stepping over obstacles) and with at least 3 arms. Only 2 arms are frequently insufficient for many tasks, when you do not have a mate to help you.
and no head with blinking eyes. A single 360° camera with a wiper blade, not to mention eyes on each hand if not finger. Although we're limited to thinking in single bodies. Maybe optimal is an 8 ft (2.5m) long tube with grippers on both ends, and they're just all coordinated together as one single being. Or maybe a Y shape. Actually, maybe a * shape. All legs. Hey, maybe that's why all the AI labs look like buttholes!
The difference is, I want the most efficient design that can complete every physical task that I can. That design is probably humanoid.
Bipedal with rollerblades, but probably more than 2 arms. Problem though is how do you get training data for that?
In non-murder tasks, humans are already obsolete. Our remaining economic value is solely alignment arbitrage, eg solving CAPTCHAs, murder, submitting 'human' papers, etc.
Given abliterated open models, Stringman is coming for our last remaining job!
This also elegantly defines the meaning of (modern) life: comply.
The tried and true Ex Machina.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Sorry - Over price claw machine:)
> Tension is all you need
Rarely does a product announcement make me laugh out loud :)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need)
I kind of want to try something like this for garden weeding. Put a small spinning blade instead of a grabber arm on it. Computer vision can identify any weeds popping up and it'll go over and cut them before they get too big/woody for the blades. The challenge would be dodging taller plants and probably the forces that the blade would put on it.
Why not use grippers to pull them? Probably more effective because there's no root to grow back from, shouldn't require too much force when they're small/the soil is damp, and you don't have to figure out torsion/"friendly fire" from a spinning blade.
I think the project difficulty grows at least 10x with all the dust, insects wind, pollen in the air and whatnot even assuming you hide it for bad weather and you have secured very stable mount points. It sure would be cool though.
Some 12ft T-post, shelter for it to park, update weak points were dust & water can intrude. I think it's doable.
A small spinning blade? Sounds like the type 1 robots from Screamers https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/
I am picturing a drone, one with the fan at the bottom :) OR one that can do a roadster maneuver at the right time.
Edit: Isn't there already one that Zap's weed with a laser?
I wonder if you could make it work vertically. It might ease the geometric challenges.
Naively, spraying targeted roundup from above or cutting a circle around the stem to kill roots kind of thing.
Roundup is gross anywhere even in small amounts. If water and energy can be provided similarly to stringman, a heating element to deliver a small payload of boiling water usually suffices.
weeds, dog poop, etc. could be useful in your yard.
I like that this doesn’t require giving up human living space for another machine.
It hangs above the head — the space that is mostly unused. It pops in only when needed, and stows back otherwise. It’s also omni-present within the room.
My thoughts while watching the video
Robot picks up clothes -> this is stupid
Robot picks up kids toys -> this is brilliant
In reality though, I think the cables will never work in a household situation. It's a interesting concept and I'm sure it was fun to build :) Makes me wonder what commercial application this would work for, I'm sure there's something out there that would benefit from this over waiting on humanoid tech
It seems like it will work well if you know you have a situation that fits well with the setup. Do you spend 4+ hours out of the house and this is in a large, rectangular room with no one walking through? Perfect.
Two people have mentioned garden applications, so maybe back yard and outside applications are where the creator needs to explore.
Though, I agree that my spouse would rather burn the house down than set this up in the living room where cables would be "ugly" and not match with our decor.
When I was 12, it was my job to pick up all the toys my much younger sibling had thrown around all house. I spent an hour every day doing that. I wish someone had gave something like this back then. It would save hundreds of hours
It seemed like an hour it was probably 10 minutes!
lol. I had much younger siblings too and have memories of pulling out the dust pan and broom if I had to clean after them. Luckily wasn’t my daily job, yikes!
Only widespread commercial application of cable robots I have seen is cameras in stadiums and concert venues.
I guess in most industrial use cases it makes more sense to have a robot stationary and move the parts around with conveyors. Doing it that way allows to pipeline and parallelize the manufacturing process. In contrast the large operating volume covered by cable robot needs to be served by single robot exclusively.
I've always thought they could be good in agriculture (can't pipeline the ground, after all). Dealing with wind would probably require a ~fully constrained 6 line system though.
"Agriculture" contains multitudes; here's an indoor pollination warehouse operation with pipeline tracks on the ground and no wind issues:
* https://costagroup.com.au/2022/07/06/world-first-robotic-pol...
* https://www.arugga.com/news/pollinating-robot-looking-to-sha...Cables are indeed used extensively in tree agriculture
https://www.fs.usda.gov/forestmanagement/equipment-catalog/c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_logging
The MakerMade CNC machine is pretty interesting concept
I'm thinking about the legos with chocolate milk spilled all over it, or the bowl of cereal sitting on top of the kids toys.
I wonder how it would handle something like a blanket or pillow on top of the toys
A fourth cable would allow you to keep the other three constrained up high, with fourth being to lower. Would require some close looped control to eliminate swaying though.
For $800 I think it's pretty incredible. If something like this is plausible then you may see a future version built with rails.
Same here I had a 3rd step in my thinking though:
Robot can't open ikea drawers -> this is not gonna work
Awesome!!! I love projects like this.
Reminded me of the Hangprinter https://github.com/tobbelobb/hangprinter which has been around for around for long time... always wanted to build one.
ETA: https://hangprinter.org/
This really needs a way to pull the strings and bot out of the way when not in use.
Something like an extra string running along the edge of a wall that could “gather up” the diagonal strings and tuck them away on an edge or corner would make this a much easier impulse purchase.
To those asking about more demanding tasks, I totally think this thing could scale up, reminds me of Maslow CNC (and predecessors):
https://www.maslowcnc.com/
basically a cable driven 4x8 sheet router.
Very cool and I'm excited to see commercial domestic helper robots that run locally without a subscription.
wait how many cameras do you need?
Very clever - and I love "tension is all you need"
Can it make a bed? Actually, can it lift a comforter? Can it fold towels?
I think the form factor is actually fine but the specs probably need a boost.
These things are scalable... but I am not sure the PAF "partner acceptance factor" would pass depending on what you wanted to accomplish.
Realistically, this has one application: The kids' room. PAF might be higher than you think.
I love the ingenuity, though it's all fun and games until someone or something manages to yank down on one of the cables...
Probably sell more of them as expensive cat toys.
I was actually just thinking about something like this this morning. Mainly because I was idly wondering if the kinematics would work with just 3 supporting cables. Intuitively, it seems like it should, but I haven't bothered to research it yet.
Anyone?
3 cables should work. Each cable length is a single parameter that defines a sphere around the mount, and the intersection of three spheres defines a point.
I suspect the reason they chose 4 is that 3 cables would limit you to a triangular region, so you’d only be able to access half the room.
Range of motion would be confined to the space beneath the triangle bounded by the three anchor points. Most spaces are rectangular, so bounding it to four corners would seem likely to give a more useful range of motion.
Perfect for your triangular rooms!
You can join two of the cables together that come from each corner unit into one. each unit - still with an eye hole in another corner - moves the cable left or right. With the opposite corner unit, you can pick X,Y on the ceiling. I'd put the third cable in the grabber, which can be used to lower it to the floor.
Probably if you went this way, you'd want to measure each ceiling cable so it is about X+Y length, or otherwise the slack needs to be held somewhere.
This is one less actuator than their system if I understand them, and they are not counting the gripper itself.
Me, i'm wondering if the coreXY kinematics could be adapted to make do with only two actuators on four anchors.
I've been wanting to build a cable robot for Halloween which flys a ghost around the front yard with a vision system that detects people passing by and the ghost floats towards them and follows them.
Awesome! Though I'm thinking that you can do MUCH MUCH more things with 2 grippers than with one. Has all been tried in terms of weight management to instead of having a motor in the air with a gripper, putting two motors on each end corner of the ceiling that can pull a line tethered to a (in the air) pulley system that grasps? You could then have say 4 lines to pull (1 left grip, 1 right grip, 1 to adjust both gripper's distance, 1 to rotate the in the air platform).
Do you think it can be scaled down to pick from random pile of M2-M5 bolts and sort into Gridfinity bins?
If you're willing to do a bit of loading and unloading labor(I know, it's a lot to ask) some people have been trying out simpler solutions to that problem: https://makerworld.com/en/models/982703-bolt-screw-separatio...
Have the claw pick up an even smaller claw that picks up the bolts!
I was thinking about one of these to find the best cellphone reception in a room.
I was working on something similar, stoked to see this type of project making it out of the labs! The inspiration for most similar systems are industrial settings with automated bridge cranes which are fantastic, almost surgical when everything is symmetrical in the active environment.
Very cool, might have to try to rig something like this up in the workshop side of our basement, which is almost always a mess.
$800 is already super cheap, and the openness makes it likely you could implement even cheaper options yourself.
This is really cool!
Would more taut crossed wires and a descending line for the grabber (like the one at an arcade) solve the humans crossing wire path problem? Then it becomes separate x/y and z.
A lot of rooms have fans and light fixtures too, another constraint to account for. I picture the wires taut and as close to the ceiling as possible
They compare it to a robotic arm, but they are a natural combination. Two arms, even, floating above it all, could scratch the dog, make breakfast, and maybe someday, fold a fitted sheet.
Even if all it can do is scratch my back, I'm in!
How is the wife acceptance factor of this thingy?
They designed the cables to go down into the room, instead of from the ceiling - seems like that is a deal breaker for most environments actually, because you need the whole room to have open space just to drop it to the floor all over.
They say they use 4 actuators, but if they only used 3, this problem would be solved.
Instead of independently controlling all four lines, you can join the lines leaving each corner unit and then just move the line left or right instead of reeling two different lines in and out. You still use the corner eye loops, and you use two cables that are X+Y in length. This allows you to pick a point on the ceiling. Then a third actuator and line in the gripper itself could lower itself to the floor.
If I understand what you're suggesting, wouldn't this result in a lot more swinging since the gripper would be suspended from a single point directly above it?
You seem to. That is a good point I hadn't considered - the tension from the sides holds it in place. Maybe we need to use a telescoping arm (which doesn't seem practical, I'm mostly joking). It might still work, but I imagine if you don't grab it on the first try, you may have to go back to the ceiling. And hope there are no strong drafts in the room.
EDIT: maybe lower it on three lines instead of one?
That too is a solvable problem if you have the sensors for it. You can critically damp or choose a motion profile to have essentially no swing.
How do you prevent having to grab things perfectly in their center of mass? (Because that requirement seems limiting)
Rigid objects would result in the gripper twisting, but the current design could offset some of that by pulling harder in one direction?
With the video, it is casually dropping things like clothes and toys into a bucket, so I'm not sure it would be a big deal. But you could also lower it via three lines instead of one, so there is something to counteract that.
I didn't understand if exactly this feature is available, but I think it would be a good idea to let the strings actually come off each motor completely when yanked hard. Interesting idea :)
Super smart but it's one of those ideas that hopefully gives someone else in this space another idea that leads to something that could mass scale and I would buy. Love the ingenuity though.
When not in use it should just hang on the ceiling as a fancy lamp
This guy does well on Instagram. Good hustle hope it works in irk reviews. Hope it survives to get to v3
Seems to work for people who basically have very empty rooms, and very orderly piles of things.
And are short enough to walk around without getting clotheslined by the cable!
It seems like the kind of thing you would set up to run when you are not in the room. The cables appear to stay taut and out of the way when it's not running.
Their example of it being used to move items between robotics stations in an automated workshop seems far more widely-applicable than the in-home solution, which I imagine is primarily aimed at assisting people with physical disabilities rather than those of us who can easily bend down and pick things up without pain or exhaustion.
You should make a demo where it plays chess with an actual board.
That's awesome!!
Looks good, but I am waiting for Droneman
Crazy expensive
I love this so much.
I built a big swing arm in my dorm, so I had two 40lb+ 21" CRT dangling free under some pulleys. Keyboard mouse space below. Then myself on a hammock chair, also swinging. Just a couple pieces of 2x4 reinforced with some angle iron, some door hinges, some cables & pulleys. It was really fun.
I've dreamed of having just a good 2d robot that can, like, hold a camera and pan. I saw Stringman here a couple of weeks ago & it's been hard to not thing about it! I don't own though, so, seems unlikely I'd commit, as alas the walls are not a simple white I can easily patch & paint. But so cool!
It's an interesting concept. If you scroll through the page you'll see it's actually pretty strong. The blanket pick up video should actually be the first video.
My fear is that a company that has the money to build and manufacture this will rip off the idea and use their resources to polish the concept. With a lot polish, this type of thing can be useful in certain environments.
Cable robots have existed for decades this is not a new concept. Anyone who wanted to rip it off could have done it long time ago.
Yes, I remember seeing another amateur project like this about a decade ago (without the "grabber" part) from scanlime on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU6omrP2iFU
So, you fear someone else making it "useful in certain environments?"
Not necessarily fear. More so, an organization with more resources could take the concept further.
By certain environments, I meant it would seem more useful in industrial or controlled environments where automation is more pratical.
I wasn't familiar with cable robots like this, so it seemed cool.
get funding for this, it's worth a shot
Come on this is not up to the standard. Consumer product must be highly polished, it can be fully unfuncyional, but it needs to look good. This one is close to my 8 years old son's tape+random lego pieces...
Reminds me of the surgery robot. Talk about an unbeatable surgery conversation:
"Make another incision ... NO! QUICK! Plug the hole with the knife"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_BlNA7bBxo
Or perhaps I should say: what about safety? Not that any of the billionaire AI companies could have been created if they actually cared about (legal, mostly) safety ... so perhaps you should just go ahead and ignore it.
Honestly yes. Everything is already too safe.
LOL @ tension is all you need
Looks jank as fuck. Why can they not stop the wobble?
At least it’s not a straw man! I will see myself out