Hello from Hello Robot!
Since we first launched Stretch in 2020, we have been amazed by how all of you have pushed its limits, making Stretch one of the most widely used mobile manipulators in the world with a growing body of publications at conferences like ICRA, IROS, CoRL, HRI, and NeurIPS. We’ve been listening and learning from the incredible amount of feedback you have provided over the years, and have been spending a lot of time in the lab working on ways that we can level up our platform across the board - and we are finally ready to share the next evolution of our hardware.
Today we are thrilled to announce Stretch 4 - our most intelligent, capable, and robust mobile manipulator yet.
If you love Stretch 3, don’t worry - we are committed to fully supporting our other robots for years to come, including software updates, active help from our support team, and readily available replacement parts. For everything related to using or purchasing a Stretch 3 (still available while supplies last!), please visit our dedicated website: https://hello-stretch3.com.
With Stretch 4, we’ve redesigned the robot from the ground up, taking the opportunity to reconsider and evolve some fundamental aspects of the robot’s architecture. Here are some of the highlights:
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Omnidirectional Mobile Base: Stretch 4 has a holonomic omnibase with three 8" omnidirectional wheels, enabling quick and smooth motion in any direction.
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Longer Battery Life: Stretch 4 is equipped with an easily swappable 512Wh LiFePO4 battery for more than double the runtime of Stretch 3 (4-8 hours) and ten times the cycle life.
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3D Sensing Head: Two hemispherical 3D LiDAR sensors and global-shutter fisheye RGB cameras observe the surroundings, generating over 2M depth readings per second and a wide-angle calibrated RGB-D point cloud at 10Hz. See stretch4_rgbd for the open source fusion pipeline. A 12MP resolution central camera observes the gripper’s workspace, supporting dexterous manipulation and Embodied AI models.
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Redesigned Dexterous Wrist: A new cobot-style 3DOF wrist gets rid of any external cabling, and can operate symmetrically in either left-handed or right-handed modes. A new quick-connect mechanism makes it easy to swap between the Stretch Gripper, a new parallel jaw gripper option, or any other tool.
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Gripper Depth Camera: A Luxonis OAK-SR depth camera at the wrist provides RGB and stereo depth, enabling visual servoing and other applications like this example showing jacobian-based gripper-centric control via gamepad.
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Upgraded Compute: Stretch 4 uses a NUC PC with 15th gen Intel Ultra 5 processor, 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM.
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Greater Speed, Reach, and Strength: The arm, lift, and base are approximately twice as fast as Stretch 3, and horizontal and vertical reach have increased by about 10%.
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Onboard NVIDIA AI Co-processor: An optional integrated Jetson Orin pre-configured with Docker, ROS 2 Jazzy, CUDA, and PyTorch can be used to offload AI tasks (eg YOLO, pose estimation, VLM inference) via Zenoh, leaving the NUC free for real-time control.
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100 Hz Client/Server Architecture: An entirely new software stack, Stretch 4 Body, runs a 100 Hz control loop on the NUC with real-time safety sentries: MuJoCo-based self-collision avoidance, IMU-based overtilt detection, guarded contact on all primary joints, pose-aware velocity limiting, and CPU thermal monitoring.
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ROS2 Support: A well-tested suite of ROS2 drivers and planning packages is available in Stretch4_ROS2. Running at a stable 100 Hz, the overhauled driver features advanced arm control with guarded contact, high-rate velocity and teleop modes, multi-robot namespacing, and seamless Nav2 integration for out-of-the-box autonomy.
Stretch 4 is available now, and will start shipping to early customers next month. Visit the all-new hello-robot.com to learn more, or reach out to us at sales@hello-robot.com with any questions. Thank you again for all your support!
Ongoing Support for Stretch 3:
For Stretch 3 and upgraded Stretch 2 robots, we’re also releasing:
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ROS 2 Upgrade: Full support for the Ubuntu 24.04 + ROS 2 Jazzy software release.
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Cross-Generational MuJoCo: A newly expanded MuJoCo simulation that supports both Stretch 3 and Stretch 4 simultaneously for mixed-fleet testing.
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Overhauled Guides: Comprehensive new documentation and tutorials (coming soon!)
Stay tuned for more!
Best Wishes,
The Hello Robot Team