Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere

Hi all, excited to share our latest work, OK-Robot, which is an open and modular framework to perform navigation and manipulation with a robot assistant in practically any homes without having to teach the robot anything new! You can simply unbox the target robot, install OK-Robot, give it a "scan" (think a 60 second iPhone video), and start asking the robot to move arbitrary things from A to B. We already tested it out in 10 home environments in New York city, and one environment each in Pittsburgh and Fremont.

We based everything off of the current best machine learning models, and so things don't quite work perfectly all the time, so we are hoping to build it together with the community! Our code is open: https://github.com/ok-robot/ok-robot and we have a Discord server for discussion and support: https://discord.gg/wzzZJxqKYC If you are curious what works and what doesn't work, take a quick look at https://ok-robot.github.io/#analysis or read our paper for a detailed analysis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12202

P.S.: while the code is open the project unfortunately isn't fully open source since one of our dependencies, AnyGrasp, has a closed-source, educational license. Apologize in advance, but we used it since that was the best grasping model we could have access to!

Would love to hear more thoughts and feedback on this project!

Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
ok-robot.github.io

That's very cool. I have almost no experience with robotics, so excuse the silly questions:

- How does it know what objects are? Does it use some sort of realtime object classifier neural net? What limitations are there here?

- Does the robot know when it can't perform a request? I.e. if you ask it to move a large box or very heavy kettlebell?

- How well does it do if the object is hidden or obscured? Does it go looking for it? What if it must move another object to get access to the requested one?

I'd love to see this be usable as potentially a mower and or vacuum/mop with different swappable components.

Make it micro.

I want mini robots cleaning dust and debris, silently and out of my way. I don’t want macro bots getting in my way