Turn your home into a giant crane game with this open source robot

Who needs a humanoid to pick up after you when you can suspend an AI-powered claw from cables near your ceiling?

Your new robot servant doesn't have to look anything like a person or walk on two legs. In fact, it might just be a claw that hangs from the ceiling instead.

That’s the future envisioned by Nathaniel Nifong, founder of Neufangled Robotics, and its Stringman robot. Put simply, Stringman is an AI-equipped claw suspended from four strings running through the corners of a room (up to 10 meters diagonally). Two motorized anchors adjust the lengths of the strings to move the claw around the room, from ceilings up to 4 meters high down to the floor to pick stuff up. With a payload capacity of around 2 kg, depending on its position, Stringman can move items to designated locations – like a toy box – and perform tidying tasks.

Stringman can also be manually controlled if you’d prefer to play a room-sized crane game by yourself. 

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According to Stringman’s documentation site, the device is currently a public prototype that “can self-calibrate in a new room and run policies, but is not yet reliable enough to be called a home appliance.” 

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That said, demonstration videos on the website show it in action, and it’s neat to watch. 

Stringman is shown picking up laundry and dropping it in a basket, putting Lego bricks and other kids' toys back where they belong, and generally zooming around rooms and demonstrating its agility. One could imagine a properly trained Stringman could even grab the remote you left on the other side of the living room and drop it in your waiting hand if you’re that incredibly lazy. 

“Our mission is to give people an organized home,” Neufangled says on its future roadmap page. “We prioritize robots that are narrowly effective at something that helps today rather than a general purpose robot that may be in development for years.”

The company further describes its goal as designing robots that are low cost and capable of doing things that people hate to do - e.g., pick up after a messy toddler - and making a robot that can do that while camouflaging itself into the home “as well as possible.” 

As long as you think a foot-long claw robot hanging from the corner of the ceiling is camouflaged, this is the robot for you. 

Neufangled lists Stringman for $795, which is a lot to ask for a public prototype that isn’t reliable enough to be called a home appliance yet. Luckily for those who’re interested in this sort of niche home automation, it’s fully open source, too. 

“A complete Stringman is three Raspberry Pis on your Wi-Fi network,” the documentation site reads: One in the gripper, and two in the corner anchor mounts that store line reels and have cameras to track the claw’s location as it moves around the room. A third camera mounted on the claw provides visual feedback. Oh, you'll also need a dedicated PC or Mac to run the robot's motion-control software. 

As for Stringman itself, to build your own, you'll need a 3D printer, a supplier to manufacture the PCBs, motors, Raspberry Pis, and other components listed in the bill of materials. You'll also need to follow the guides on the documentation site to get it up and running, calibrate it for your space using printed markers, set up drop-off points using visual tags, and program it to perform tasks.

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But is it safe? One could imagine getting tangled in the lines if you get in Stringman’s way. Nifong admits that can happen, writing in the documentation that he has walked into the lines himself without injury.

“I live with two of these, and I've walked into the lines before. It's startling, but harmless — they're light and they give,” he writes. According to the robot’s website, it has a tension limit of 28 newtons, or around six and a quarter pounds of force. If that limit is reached, all of the lines relax and can be pulled loose.

Those who want to play with a simulated Stringman can do so on Stringman’s web portal, which includes options to connect to a personal machine over LAN, the cloud, or a simulated version. Hopefully it’s easier to work with than an arcade claw. ®