This Robot Hangs From the Ceiling Like a Room-Cleaning Spider

The whole “physical AI” trend of the past couple of years has largely focused on humanoid robots that can inhabit spaces designed for people. And though there is wisdom in that, humanoid robots are very difficult to build and very expensive. This robot, designed by Nathaniel Nifong, is more like a spider than a human, and it is much more accessible.

This robot is called Stringman and it is a CDPR (cable-driven parallel robot). That means it hangs from cables anchored to the corners of the room. The anchors can spool or unspool the cables on-demand, adjusting the cable lengths. By coordinating the relative cable lengths, it can move the end effector (called the Arpeggio gripper) to any point in 3D space within the envelope of the room.

The “Pilot” anchors contain NEMA 17 stepper motors and MKS42C controllers to actuate their spools. They also have integrated cameras to monitor the position of the Arpeggio and recognize objects in the room. The Arpeggio has two fingers actuated by ST3215 servo motors, with a four-link gripper that opens wide and closes parallel.

Each piece of the robot (the Pilot anchors and the Arpeggio gripper) has a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer that communicates with a central computer that does the real thinking. That relies on a variety of conventional computer vision software and AI models to figure out what to do. There are a lot of different possibilities, depending on what the user wants to achieve, and Nifong’s implementation lets users train their systems to work in their own environments. However, that isn’t intuitive at all and doing so will challenge even the savviest tech veterans.

But the potential may be worth the work, because a Stringman robot in a typical rectangular room can do a lot. The most obvious use case is cleaning up. The robot can move around the room, recognize clutter, and either throw it away or put it back where it belongs. It can also do a lot more than clean — though you’ll have to train it for the task.

The best part is that Stringman is available right now and it only costs $1,000 for the kit. It isn’t plug-and-play and will require a lot of work to get running, but it sure beats another pilot-controlled tech demo of a humanoid robot you can’t actually buy.