Show HN: MARS – Personal AI robot for builders (< $2k)

Summary

Hey, we’re Axel and Vignesh, cofounders of Innate (https://www.innate.bot/). We just launched MARS, a general-purpose robot with an open onboard agentic OS built on top of ROS2.Overview: https://youtu.be/GEOMYDXv6pEControl demo: https://youtu.be/_Cw5fGa8i3sVideos of autonomous use-cases: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-example-use-casesQuickstart: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-quick-start.Our last thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451707When we started we felt there is currently no good affordable general-purpose that anyone can build on. There’s no lack of demand: hugging face’s SO-100 and LeKiwi are pretty clear successes already; but the hardware is unreliable, the software experience is barebone and keeps changing, and you often need to buy hidden extras to make them work (starting with a computer with a good gpu). The Turtlebots were good, but are getting outdated.The open-source hobbyist movement lacks really good platforms to build on, and we wanted something robust and accessible. MARS is our attempt at making a first intuitive AI robot for everyone.What it is:- It comes assembled and calibrated- Has onboard compute with a jetson orin nano 8gb- a 5DoF arm with a wrist camera- Sensors: RGBD wide-angle cam, 2D LiDAR, speakers- Control via a dedicated app and a leader arm that plugs in iPhone and Android- 2 additional USB ports + GPIO pins for extra sensors or effectors.- And our novel SDK called BASIC that allows to run it like an AI agent with VLAs.It boots in a minute, can be controlled via phone, programmable in depth with a PC, and the onboard agent lets it see, talk, plan, and act in real-time.Our SDK BASIC allows to create “behaviors” (our name for programs) ranging from a simple hello world to a very complex long-horizon task involving reasoning, planning, navigation and manipulation. You can create skills that behaviors can run autonomously by training the arm or writing code tools, like for an AI agent.You can also call the RO...