Hello Robot's Charlie Kemp: Stretch robots help people live independently

Charlie Kemp's path to Hello Robot began with an interest in the grand challenges of artificial intelligence. As an undergraduate at MIT, he was drawn to Prof. Rod Brooks's Cog project, which used humanoid robots to investigate embodied intelligence. He later joined Brooks's lab and worked on the humanoid robot Domo with his future cofounder, Dr. Aaron Edsinger. Their 2006 paper on a system that enabled Domo to help a person put objects on a shelf won the best paper award at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics and led to Kemp's interest in assistive robotics and a faculty position at Georgia Tech.

At Georgia Tech, Kemp's lab conducted research as part of Robots for Humanity, a collaboration that began in 2010 after Henry Evans saw a demonstration on CNN. Henry has severe quadriplegia, and he and Jane Evans became pioneers in assistive robotics. Creating a home robot for Henry and Jane was the main inspiration for the prototype that led Aaron and Kemp to found Hello Robot. Henry and Jane have used each generation of Stretch, influencing subsequent designs, especially Stretch 4. Kemp notes that the field is still young, and that real-world interactions reveal opportunities for improvement. He also points to the role of application experts, such as Dr. Vy Nguyễn, Hello Robot's clinical research lead, who started in robotics while earning a doctorate in occupational therapy.

The stakes for Hello Robot's approach hinge on whether assistive robots can prove productive in real-world settings, not just in demos. As Kemp puts it, the world is extraordinarily good at breaking robotic systems in ways that surprise roboticists, so there remains an enormous amount to build and learn. For older adults and people with severe mobility impairments, the payoff could be greater independence and improved quality of life, but only if the technology bridges the gap between promising demonstrations and everyday usefulness. That gap is likely to shape how quickly assistive robots move into homes and workplaces.