Hacker News front pageSep 2, 2026, 01:35 UTC+8

Nori Robotics launches A3, a $1,688 bimanual home robot for development

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

YC S26 startup Nori Robotics opens preorders for the A3, a $1,688 bimanual robot shipping fall 2026. It has 7+1 DOF arms, 1.5 kg payload per arm, four 720p cameras, a 12 m Lidar, and 6–8 hours of battery life. Demo videos show tidying, fetching, folding, and pouring. A Skills Marketplace lets users train and share behaviors. The post doesn't disclose the AI stack, training method, or software framework, so I'd treat this as a hardware platform announcement for now.

Why it matters: Price and skills marketplace are the hooks, but the product page lacks key info: no autonomy success rates, no third-party reviews, no real-world deployment evidence beyond a ship date. Scored at the featured threshold based on hardware specs alone; will adjust once hands-on r...

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The price is what makes this worth a click: $1,688 for a bimanual robot with Lidar and 6–8 hours of battery life. That's an order of magnitude cheaper than Unitree's G1 at $16K or anything Figure has quoted. The demo videos show tidying, fridge-fetching, folding, and pouring — the motion looks smooth enough.

I'd discount the pitch a bit, though. The page says nothing about the AI stack. Is this end-to-end learned, teleoperated and replayed, or driven by an off-the-shelf VLM? The Skills Marketplace sounds like users train behaviors and share them, but there's zero detail on the training interface, data format, or model architecture. The 720p cameras and 1.5 kg per-arm payload also signal this isn't built for heavy work — it's more of a dev chassis for experiments.

If they actually ship in fall 2026, this price point is genuinely interesting for university labs and hobbyists who want a bimanual platform. Just don't read it as "general-purpose home robot goes on sale." Too many blanks right now. Treat it as a mobile manipulation dev kit and the value proposition makes more sense.

Source: Hacker News front page · norirobotics.com
Published: Sep 2, 2026, 01:35 UTC+8 · 28 days ago