Stringman

$795

A room scale cable robot, hung from anchors mounted in the corners of your ceiling and controlled by gamepad, Lerobot models, or MCP server. This is the assembled version that requires only installation and calibration in your room. Lift 2kg with whole room reach while controlling from anywhere. Suitable for rooms up to 7x7x3 meters.

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Stringman: A Room-Scale Cable Robot

Stringman is a ceiling-mounted, cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) designed to enable room-scale manipulation without the constraint of an arm clamped to a desk or the cost of mobile balancing and navigation.

Stringman remains entirely off the floor, offering a unique sandbox for Imitation Learning (IL), Teleoperation, and Home Automation experimentation on more than just desk toys. The work area can be an entire room.

Why the ceiling? Avoiding the floor means avoiding navigation and balance, so you can focus on higher-level tasks and start automating the organization of objects in the room while keeping it low cost.

The Platform

Stringman is an open source hardware platform and software stack. It is fully compatible with the Lerobot AI framework and recording datasets can be done from the UI.

Kinematics: 4-wire suspended motion system based on two pairs of anchors and two passive eyelets. 2-dof gripper.
Payload: 2 kg dynamic lifting capacity (specific capacity depends on end effector speed and altitude.)
Workspace: Rooms up to 12 meters from one floor corner to opposite ceiling corner (about 8m × 8m × 3m).
Compute: External. Robot components run on Raspberry Pi Zero 2Ws streaming video to a host machine running the motion controller.

Technical Specifications

Feature	Specification
Vision System	3-Camera (2 overhead cameras in anchors, 1 wrist camera viewing fingers) for global localization and target identification.
End-Effector	Two-fingered servo gripper with integrated finger pressure sensor, IMU, and laser rangefinder.
Anchors	2 anchors, each housing a pair of Damiao H6215 BLDC direct drive hub motors with integrated FOC controllers for quiet and powerful motion. Two additional eyelets are mounted on adjacent walls to create four pull points.
Power	Two outlets are required, one near each anchor. 24V is supplied to the gripper via one of the support lines.
Safety	Independent wireless hardware E-Stop to instantly kill power to all modules. Motors deactivate when excessive torque is applied, so a person can overpower them if necessary.

Control & Intelligence

The Stringman motion controller is the brain of the robot, running headless on a host machine. Several control methods are available including a maneuver API (code as policy), lerobot control, or MCP server control. See the system architecture for how the pieces fit together.

A web-based UI allows 3D visualization of the workspace, tension monitoring, and automatic calibration. The robot can operate in LAN-only local mode where no data leaves your network, or in a cloud telemetry mode that uses Neufangled Robotics' servers to allow secure access to your robot from anywhere.

A cloud connected robot can also be shared with other logged in users for remote operation.

Stringman currently utilizes a custom control stack using one model for identifying targets, and lerobot trained models for grasping tasks. Dropoff locations are specified by attaching April tags to bins such as the laundry hamper. A procedure combines these for continuous target-pick-and-place.

Teleop: Use a gamepad to navigate the room. The system handles the kinematics of the four-cable system, and can be made to orbit your position in the room.
Custom control: The nf_robot Python module makes it easy to hook into the robot's state and write your own high-level behaviors.
Lerobot: Record teleoperation datasets from the control panel and train your own AI using Google colab to imitate any behavior you need.
AI agents (MCP): The motion controller can serve an MCP server, so an AI agent such as can watch the cameras, drive the robot, and even write new behaviors and load them into the running controller.

System Requirements

Host PC: A machine (Linux or Mac recommended) with 6+ cores. If no GPU or NPU is present the robot can still be driven manually, but no AI based control will be possible. AI acceleration is fully supported on Mac.
Environment: Consistent and strong indoor lighting in the work area is needed to maintain high precision.
Game Controller: Analog stick inputs from a game controller are highly reccomended for fine control of Stringman when recording a dataset. Keyboard control is supported. For mac, a Dualshock 4 is reccomended, for Linux, the Logitech F710 controller is reccomended, For Windows, Xbox controllers.

Appearance and Livability

Parked out of reach: The support lines remain connected when powered off and hang taut across the ceiling of the room. They are thin and very hard to see from a distance, and out of reach when parked. They can be disconnected in about 1 minute using carabiners. The gripper hangs on a parking structure also mounted to the wall, with the flexibility to place this structure on any wall above head level.
Quick disconnect: If necessary the whole system can be removed from the walls without tools and stored in about five minutes, leaving only small white butterfly shaped brackets on the wall.
Mounting options: Anchors can be mounted into studs behind drywall, onto drop-ceiling T-bars, or on tripods if they are sufficiently stable and weighed down.
Minimalist look: The spool anchors have a simple, minimalist white cover designed to blend in with the wall.
Gripper customization: The gripper shell is shipped in white but is easy to reprint in any color you like. STLs are provided on the downloads page.

Kill switch

In North America, stringman ships with commodity outlet remotes that double as the software-free kill switch.

Outside of North America, this part is not included, but is easy to source locally for the outlet types in your country, and the cost ($15) is deducted from the original shipping rate to non-north american customers.