About

About Stretch Research Edition

Stretch RE1 combined a differential-drive mobile base with a vertical lift, telescoping arm, wrist and gripper in a narrow body designed to work close to furniture and people. A mobile head provided RGB-D perception, while a telescoping structure extended the arm horizontally from the compact body. The design supported manipulation from a compact footprint suitable for homes and laboratories.

Researchers used RE1 through ROS and Hello Robot’s Python interfaces for navigation, teleoperation, human–robot interaction and assistive tasks such as feeding and object retrieval. The model is now a legacy generation: Hello Robot has offered RE1 owners trade-in routes toward later hardware, while Stretch 3 carries the current research platform forward with updated compute, sensing and manipulation.

Capabilities

Source-backed capabilities

Workflows: Autonomous navigation, object handling, dual-arm or arm-based manipulation, teleoperation and facility task execution.
Operating environments: Factories, warehouses, labs, service sites and controlled indoor environments where wheeled manipulation can operate safely.
Target markets: Industrial operators, logistics teams, research labs and service organizations evaluating mobile manipulation.
Deployment model: Commercial or available product positioned for customer use, integration or developer adoption.
Whole-body loco-manipulation
Claimed - 2020-07-14 - Hello Robot emerged from stealth and introduced Stretch Research Edition as an open-source mobile manipulation platform for home and workplace robotics research.
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Supply

Supply / Components

Stretch Research Edition
Smart Servo Actuator - Motion Components - ROBOTIS - Hello Robot's earlier Stretch Research Edition used ROBOTIS DYNAMIXEL servos in its head and end-of-arm assemblies - source: docs.hello-robot.com
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Stretch Research Edition
Rplidar - robot_sensing - SLAMTEC - Hello Robot Stretch Research Edition used SLAMTEC RPLIDAR for laser ranging - source: dev-docs.hello-robot.com
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Stretch Research Edition
Realsense D435i - robot_vision - RealSense - Hello Robot Stretch Research Edition used a RealSense D435i head camera - source: forum.hello-robot.com
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Research

Hello Stretch Robot 3: Human-Robot Interaction Study Questionnaire (English/Estonian) and 42 response items
2026-06-10 - Research Publication - Hello Stretch Robot 3: Human-Robot Interaction Study Questionnaire (English/Estonian) and 42 response items Zenodo Skip to main You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.
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Human Recognition–Driven Interaction with Hello Robot Stretch for Supporting Older Adults
2026-06-10 - Research Publication - The ARSO paper uses Hello Robot Stretch for human-recognition-driven interaction in older-adult support. The study’s named evaluation platform is Stretch Research Edition from Hello Robot.
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YOLOv8-PnP fusion architecture for non-contact robotic pollination: a 6D pose estimation approach for autonomous greenhouse operations
2026-03-26 - Research Publication - YOLOv8-PnP fusion architecture for non-contact robotic pollination: a 6D pose estimation approach for autonomous greenhouse operations. The system employs a custom-designed Air Pollenmatic end-effector integrated with a Hello Robot Stretch platform through ROS-based visual servoing control. Field trials achieved 92.5% pollination attempt rate and 85.6% success rate, yielding 79.2% overall efficacy—an 8.3 percentage point improvement over contact-based methods.
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Hello Stretch Robot 3: Human-Robot Interaction Study Questionnaire (English/Estonian)
2026-03-15 - Research Publication - Hello Stretch Robot 3: Human-Robot Interaction Study Questionnaire (English/Estonian) Zenodo Skip to main You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.
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NhiNguyencmt8/StretchMapping: First release
2026-02-16 - Research Publication - Georgia Institute of Technology Description A semantic mapping framework built on Khronos and ORB-SLAM2 for creating a semantic map using the Hello Robot Stretch mobile manipulator. NhiNguyencmt8/StretchMapping: First release Zenodo Skip to main You are using an outdated browser.
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Robotic support for older adults with cognitive and mobility impairments
2025-04-07 - Research Publication - Robotic support for older adults with cognitive and mobility impairments. Stretch is a mobile robot manipulator designed to support everyday activities using a lightweight telescoping arm mounted on a mobile base. Results and Discussion The participants were asked to share potential areas of application related to their daily activities to illustrate how Stretch could support them in their homes.
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Implicit-communication paper studies collaborative transport with Hello Robot Stretch
2025-02-05 - Research Publication - The paper studies implicit communication in human-robot collaborative transport using motion cues rather than explicit verbal instruction. The experiments use a Hello Robot Stretch mobile manipulator in collaborative object transport tasks.
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ANAVI: Audio Noise Awareness using Visuals of Indoor environments for NAVIgation
2024-10-24 - Research Publication - The authors propose Audio Noise Awareness using Visuals of Indoors for NAVIgation for quieter robot path planning. Unifying ANP with action acoustics, the authors demonstrate experiments with wheeled (Hello Robot Stretch) and legged (Unitree Go2) robots so that these robots adhere to the noise constraints of the environment.
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Coherence-Driven Multimodal Safety Dialogue with Active Learning for Embodied Agents
2024-10-18 - Research Publication - The system leverages discourse coherence relations to enhance its contextual understanding and communication abilities. In the study, participants role-play two safety scenarios with different levels of severity with the robot and receive interventions from the model and a baseline system powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
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Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments
2024-09-09 - Research Publication - The authors present Robot Utility Models (RUMs), a framework for training and deploying zero-shot robot policies that can directly generalize to new environments without any finetuning. The authors train five such utility models for opening cabinet doors, opening drawers, picking up napkins, picking up paper bags, and reorienting fallen objects.
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Automated Robot Recovery from Assumption Violations of High-Level Specifications
2024-06-30 - Research Publication - The paper presents a framework that enables robots to automatically recover from assumption violations of high-level specifications during task execution. The authors demonstrate the approach with a Hello Robot Stretch in a factory-like scenario.
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HomeRobot: An Open Source Software Stack for Mobile Manipulation Research
2024-01-22 - Research Publication - HomeRobot: An Open Source Software Stack for Mobile Manipulation Research. The authors propose HomeRobot, a mobile manipulator software stack with associated benchmark in simulation, which is initially based on the low-cost, human-safe Hello Robot Stretch. .
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OK-Robot evaluates open-vocabulary mobile manipulation on Stretch
2024-01-22 - Research Publication - OK-Robot combines vision-language object detection, navigation, and grasping modules for training-free pick-and-drop tasks. The authors evaluate the system in 10 real-world home environments using a Hello Robot Stretch platform. The paper reports a 58.5 percent success rate on open-ended tasks and higher performance in cleaner, less cluttered settings.
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Stretch with Stretch study uses Stretch RE1 for physical-therapy exercise games
2023-12-20 - Research Publication - The study builds a Stretch-based system that verbally and visually guides older adults with Parkinson's disease through physical-therapy exercise games. Stretch RE1 uses its soft end effector as an adaptive target for hand, foot, and knee reaching exercises. A 10-participant user study reported that participants found the system useful and easy to use.
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An Assistive Robot in an Indoor Scenario: the Stretch Hello Robot as Environment Organizer
2023-10-25 - Research Publication - The MetroXRAINE paper uses Stretch Hello Robot as an assistive indoor environment organizer. The study’s named evaluation platform is Stretch Research Edition from Hello Robot.
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HomeRobot benchmark uses Stretch for open-vocabulary mobile manipulation
2023-06-20 - Research Publication - HomeRobot introduces an open-vocabulary mobile-manipulation benchmark for navigating to novel household objects, grasping them, and placing them on target receptacles. The real-world component provides a software stack for Hello Robot Stretch so labs can replicate physical OVMM experiments. The paper reports a 20 percent real-world success rate for its baselines and frames the failures as a route to stronger integrated systems.
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Custom teleoperation-interface study evaluates Stretch RE1 in assistive kitchen tasks
2023-04-05 - Research Publication - The study evaluates browser-based teleoperation interfaces for people with severe physical limitations using a Stretch RE1 mobile manipulator. Participants with and without motor impairments used the robot in a real kitchen environment for navigation and manipulation tasks. The results support Stretch as a research platform for accessible remote operation and home-assistance workflows.
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Online Modifications for Event-based Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
2023-03-31 - Research Publication - The physical setup uses Stretch as a mobile manipulator to pick objects from known locations and deliver them to known depots in a laboratory. One runtime modification adds 15 seconds after a pre-failure warning so Stretch can reach the object without violating the specification. Other demonstrations change the target object, retract the arm further, add obstacle avoidance and allow an alternate delivery depot.
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Force/Torque Sensing for Soft Grippers using an External Camera
2022-09-30 - Research Publication - The authors present Visual Force/Torque Sensing (VFTS), a method that visually estimates the 6-axis F/T measurement that would be reported by a conventional F/T sensor. VFTS includes a deep learning model that takes a single RGB image as input and outputs a 6-axis F/T estimate.
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Walleclipse/WeHelp
2022-05-10 - Research Publication - WeHelp Abulikemu Abuduweili, Alice Wu, Tianhao Wei, Weiye Zhao, WeHelp: A Shared Autonomy System for Wheelchair Users, arXiv 2024. The authors implemented WeHelp on the Stretch Research Edition (RE1) robot by Hello Robot, a mobile manipulator designed for home environments.
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Visual Pressure Estimation and Control for Soft Robotic Grippers
2022-04-14 - Research Publication - The authors present visual pressure estimation & control (VPEC), a method that infers pressure applied by a soft gripper using an RGB image from an external camera. The authors also show that VPEC enables precision manipulation via closed-loop control of inferred pressure images.
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Timeline

Hello Robot introduces Stretch Research Edition mobile manipulator
2020-07-14 - Product Launch - Hello Robot emerged from stealth and introduced Stretch Research Edition as an open-source mobile manipulation platform for home and workplace robotics research. The first Stretch platform was priced at USD 17,950 and focused on researchers and developers rather than consumer deployment. The launch established Hello Robot's non-humanoid approach to useful home robotics through a lightweight mobile base, telescoping arm and gripper.
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Context

Market context

Original research-focused Stretch platform from Hello Robot, establishing the company's compact mobile-manipulation approach for home and lab robotics.

Target environment: Factories, warehouses, labs, service sites and controlled indoor environments where wheeled manipulation can operate safely.
Workflow context: Autonomous navigation, object handling, dual-arm or arm-based manipulation, teleoperation and facility task execution.
Customer context: Industrial operators, logistics teams, research labs and service organizations evaluating mobile manipulation.
Deployment model: Commercial or available product positioned for customer use, integration or developer adoption.
Commercial maturity: Publicly presented as commercial or available, with maturity depending on deployment scale and support coverage.
Adoption constraints: Adoption depends on site fit, manipulation reliability, safety, navigation, integration effort and task economics.
Market position: Stretch Research Edition sits in the mobile-manipulation lane, using mobility plus arms to pursue practical physical tasks.
Adjacent products: Kinisi 01, DexForce W1, Stretch RE2, Quanta X2

Comparable Systems

Stretch 4
Hello Robot - Mobile Manipulator

Stretch Research Edition