Introducing Flourish One, the Raspberry Pi-based humanoid built for busy parents

Flourish, a startup straddling San Francisco and Paris, is ready to open sales for Flourish One, a $3,555 humanoid-style wheeled home robot that early adopters can teach new chores in under 30 minutes using just a smartphone.

Aiming directly at busy parents rather than factories, founder Antoine Marcel is betting that at-home, cloud-based skills and phone-based teleoperation will make this first batch of 50 robots a testbed for practical home robotics.

Most humanoid and mobile manipulator startups pursue factory or warehouse work, where environments are structured and data is plentiful. Flourish is deliberately taking on the messiest challenge in the house.

Marcel’s thesis is that each household’s routines, layout and cleaning standards are too idiosyncratic for a one-size-fits-all generalist model, so Flourish One refines its skills task by task, house by house, using motion data captured from the owner’s phone and AI models running in the cloud.

The result, if it works, could be one of the first commercially available robots that busy families can actually train to perform real tasks, even as a small team builds the first 50 units by hand to learn what home robotics really looks like outside the lab.

The company was founded in January this year and represents another humanoid company that will hit the market in less than 12 months.

Marcel is obsessed with time management and tells him about it The robot report“I automated everything in my computer… But when I got home, the most painful things in my life were still there.”

When asked why start at home rather than an industrial application, Marcel replied that every home is different: organization and routines are personal. Instead of waiting for a generalist AI model, Flourish perfects every task and every home.

“The way I tidy up my apartment is not the same as your house. For 30 minutes you’re going to show him how to water your plants,” she said. “We will refine an AI model for this… now the robot can do this in your home.”

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Flourish One has a base with wheels and two arms

The Flourish One robot is built on a movable base with six wheels for stability. Each of the two arms has a payload capacity of 1.5 kg (4 lb.). The battery is designed for 12 hours of arm operation.

“We chose 1.5kg because in homes most tasks don’t require a huge payload,” Marcel noted.

For obstacle detection, the robot uses a small lidar, positioned on the base near the floor. Each of the two-finger grippers is equipped with a wrist-mounted camera for manipulation tasks.

Flourish One is not waterproof; he will not wash the dishes or wash the dog in his first generation. The robot has limited dexterity but is suitable for tidying up, clearing rubbish and basic cleaning such as wiping a table, but not for complex assembly.

The robot will hit the market with a price tag of $3,555, and Flourish said it hopes to ship before Christmas. To help keep bill of materials (BOM) costs low, the unit is powered by a Raspberry Pi.

The architecture will use cloud GPUs for training skill models and inference for higher-level behaviors. It will require a network connection to “think” or users will be able to optionally run workloads on their own computers.

Marcel said he is optimistic that this architecture is the optimal solution for an affordable home robot. “If we were to put an NVIDIA GPU in the robot, the cost would immediately double,” he said.

Smartphone app to enable robot training

The company is developing a smartphone app that will use inertial measurement units (IMUs) inside the phone for teaching and teleoperation. The user holds the phone and moves it as if performing the task, while the robot mirrors the action.

“That’s what’s magical about Flourish,” according to Marcel. “When you train your robot to water your plants, you simply pick up the phone, move the phone and it will move its arms. We don’t need any other hardware.”