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Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

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Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#1

Post by AntonioLi »

Hey HN, I’m Antonio from Nori Robotics (https://norirobotics.com). We build a $1,688 bimanual mobile robot in San Francisco for robotics developers and researchers.

I started working on Nori while doing robotics research at Columbia. I was teaching robots through human demonstrations, but getting my hands on affordable hardware was difficult. Most labs have one or two expensive robots, which makes it hard to collect large datasets, run long experiments, or test across several robots.

So I built my own. After seven iterations the latest Nori has:

* 19 degrees of freedom

* Two 7+1 DOF arms with a 1.5 kg payload per arm

* A 55 kg telescoping lift

* A differential wheeled base

* Four 720p, 30 fps RGB cameras

* 2D lidar

* A dual microphone array with full-duplex voice communication

* A 432 Wh battery

* A Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 GB RAM (SLAM and safeties are run on board, heavier ACT and VLAs must be run from a computer via LAN or a server via WAN)

Getting this under $2,000 was the main engineering challenge. Nori has more than 100 moving and structural parts, so costs add up quickly across actuators, bearings, wiring, power delivery, and assembly. Some main choices we made to get the cost low was using high-ratio servos instead of QDD motors, and using a wheel base instead of legs.

We assemble each robot in San Francisco and have designed it to be easy to manufacture and repair (we offer 3D files to print repairs).

Our open SDK includes teleoperation and demonstration tools: https://github.com/Nori-Robotics/nori-sdk-py

We also built a browser-based simulator so you can try it out: https://lab.norirobotics.com/nori/model

We’ve shipped our first robot and are building the next batch. Eventually, we want people without robotics experience to teach Nori tasks and share them with other owners.

Currently the hardware is already capable of basic cleaning tasks, opening drawers, restocking shelves and pouring beers. Here is a video of Nori doing things: https://youtube.com/shorts/VRfVXHfQvD8

We make money by selling the hardware for $1,688, with optional paid software on top. Parts of hardware are open source. More details are in our hardware paper: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16537

If you work in robotics, what would you build with a robot at this price? What would you change about the hardware?

Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development
norirobotics.com

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#2

Post by TristanX »

Love the design and freedom of this! Curious what the business model of this is to make the company sustainable. Asking that because I was part of the K-scale labs community and sad to see it shut down due to the competition with low-cost chinese robots

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#3

Post by jonplackett »

Looks cool.

Can you be up front about its real capabilities. Are these videos of it eg tidying up real or just staged / cherry picked?

If you let it loose in a messy room or stirring something in a kitchen, what are the genuine results you would expect in the wild?

We’re all used to seeing things like Atlas back flipping but then can’t do anything in a real environment. Just curious how this fits in and what the success / fail rate is.

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#4

Post by dvt »

Neat vision, but I can only imagine this thing literally fucking everything up. Like, knocking shit off my table, setting my kitchen on fire, bumping into things like an idiot.

Not sure who the market is here apart from SF tech bros with money to burn.

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#7

Post by jdiff »

jonplackett wrote: post #3

Looks cool. Can you be up front about its real capabilities. Are these videos of it eg tidying up real or just staged / cherry picked? If you let it loose in a messy room or stirring something in a kitchen, what are the genuine results you would expect in the wild? We’re all used to seeing things like Atlas back flipping but then can’t do anything in a real environment. Just curious how this fits in and what the succ…

That video of it folding clothes would seem to hint at that. It's only able to awkwardly throw it into a pile, but they still included it. It's clearly a very cool project, but it suggests the claimed capabilities are more show than substance.

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#8

Post by mchusma »

This is cool! As someone who's built based off of old Roomba platforms and other models, I feel like this looks pretty fun and a good price point. What do you think the next version will target? Will you stay educational and low price point? Targeting some other usecases?

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#9

Post by ghm2199 »

awesome!

Could it put small to medium sized packages in a package room of a condo?

Hopefully upto 24" in any dimension and 5-10 lbs(and ignore the others it can't handle)?

The set up of the small room: three stacked total height 5' rack shelves on both sides and a 2' wide passage in the middle.

Not saying off the shelf but how hard would it be to teach it how to do that?

Re: Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

#10

Post by mrnotcrazy »

My question would be how riffable is it? I don't have 10-20k to drop on a robot. I work for co-ops so while I make good money(90k~ pretty good!) its less than I could make else where but the trade off is I have more time to build random stuff. 2k is the price point for me where I might buy a big thing every so many years, teaching this to play board games, making new hands for it, teaching it to clean etc would be fun and at a price point that works for me. I would probably want a suction attachment for the fingers so it could handle cards and other flat tokens but that seems simple enough to build given the 3d models for printing are included.

I could see myself printing all sorts of costumes for it and using it as an ad hoc characters for tabletop games or as a spare bandmate if I ever finish my synth.

"We make money by selling the hardware for $1,688, with optional paid software on top."

The software would have to be quite good and also affordable for me to consider it, as all subscriptions are liabilities. I might one day want my robot to go with me to a show or to do something meaningful. Whenever that happens I will NOT be held hostage by software and will either source my own software or replace parts of the hardware till something works before I keep throwing money at a bad service. I would prefer to just have a good vendor supported software that I don't have to think about but I have trust issues. Privacy would be a huge concern, I can't have this in my garage lab with all my stuff being sent back to your servers for computer vision tasks etc.

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