Community for Building the “PC of Robotics”

“The HomeBrew Robotics Network is a global extension of the HomeBrew Robotics Club, which is to robots what the Homebrew Computer Club was to PCs.”

This repo hosts the source for the HomeBrew Robotics Network website and related materials (logo, landing page, docs).

HBRN is a decentralized, open, community-driven effort to make helpful low-cost household robots as ubiquitous and hackable as personal computers.

Why HBRN?

The personal computing revolution started with:

• cheap DIY kits (Altair 8800),
• hobbyist clubs (Homebrew Computer Club),
• and open standards (IBM PC, BASIC, Unix).

Today robotics is at a similar inflection point:

Historical Price Trends in Mobile Manipulation

Table 1: Price comparison of commercial and DIY mobile manipulation systems.
MoMa: Mobile Manipulation. BiMoMa: Bi-Manual Mobile Manipulation.

Open-source frameworks like LeRobot are early attempts at a shared “robot stack.”

What’s missing is a network: open community, shared standards, a common culture, and a place for builders to collaborate.

HBRN exists to fill that gap.

Mission

Build the PC of Robotics through open hardware, software, standards, and grassroots communities.

We imagine a world where:

• helpful robots can carry, assemble, clean, cook, and entertain,
• they are affordable, programmable, and present in every home,
• no single closed company can out-innovate a global community of builders.

Guiding Principles

• If something isn’t right, change it.
  Inspired by Wikipedia

• Decentralized to last.
  Inspired by the early Internet & Bitcoin

• Open to the core and community-driven.
  Inspired by Linux

The HBRN Architecture: Three Layers

HBRN is organized around three mutually reinforcing layers.

1. Community Layer

HBRC + University / Regional Nodes

The foundation is a distributed network of clubs, labs, and hackerspaces:

• Core nodes:

  • HomeBrew Robotics Club (HBRC) — founded in 1984 as a spiritual successor to the original Homebrew Computer Club.
  • LeRobot - started by Hugging Face in 2024, serving as a modern open-source community for models, datasets, and tools for real-world robotics.

• Regional & university nodes (examples):

  • West Coast: UC Berkeley, Stanford
  • Midwest: Rice University, UIUC
  • Northeast: MIT, Northeastern, Columbia
  • Southeast: University of Miami, University of South Florida
  • and growing...

Planned community channels:

• shared Discords/Mailing Lists
• monthly meetups & hack nights
• cross-node demos and student pipelines
• a national “HomeBrew Robotics Network Meetup” series

The goal is to make it easy to find collaborators, share designs & code, and converge on emerging standards.

2. Infrastructure & Standards Layer

The “Microsoft + IBM” layer of robotics

Robotics today is fragmented: many ad-hoc ROS stacks, custom drivers, and bespoke teleop pipelines.

HBRN aims to define the shared abstractions that make robots programmable like PCs.

Software Standards (DOS-like)

Open problems we want to tackle together:

• A composable policy / operator learning framework for teleop, imitation, and autonomy
• A unified behavior-programming API across robots
• Common controller & driver interfaces for heterogeneous hardware
• A lightweight, household-robot-focused runtime / OS

Hardware Standards (IBM-like)

Complementing the software stack:

• Reference open architectures for mobile manipulation and humanoids
  (e.g., XLe, Humanoid Lite)
• Standardized actuator, sensor, and communication interfaces
• A crisp definition of the HuBiMoMa class:
  Humanoid / Bi-manual / Mobile Manipulator

Together these form the backbone of an open robotics ecosystem, analogous to BASIC + Unix/Linux + MS-DOS + IBM PC for computers.

3. Ecosystem Layer

Open, modular companies

On top of shared standards, we expect a vibrant ecosystem of interoperable niche players, not one monolithic stack:

• Hardware: Unitree, 1X, Apptronik, Hello Robot, Low-Cost DIY
• Software: model providers, planning stacks, simulation, teleop tools
• Education: kits, curricula, training programs
• Verticals: eldercare, logistics, household services, small-business robotics

If you’re building in this space, HBRN is a place to align with standards, not a competitor.

Who Is This For?

• Students & hobbyists building DIY robots in garages, clubs, or dorms
• Researchers & labs working on low-cost manipulation and humanoids
• Open-source contributors building drivers, planners, and learning pipelines
• Companies & nonprofits who want interoperable, open robotics standards

If you see “Altair-era” energy in current robotics, you’re in the right place.

Getting Started

1. Visit the site
   This repo backs the HBRN GitHub Pages site (e.g. hbrnetwork.github.io).
   Open it in your browser to see the latest landing page, events, and docs.

2. Join or start a node

   • Already part of a robotics group on the Discord? Add yourself as a regional node.
   • Want to start a HomeBrew Robotics Network meetup in your city? Open an issue with:
     • location
     • affiliation (if any)
     • primary contact
     • what you’re working on

3. Build a reference robot

   • Try replicating a low-cost platform like XLe, LeKiwi, or Humanoid Lite.
   • Share your BOMs, build guides, and lessons learned in this repo or your own, then link back.

4. Contribute to standards

   • Propose APIs for teleop, behavior libraries, or drivers.
   • Add write-ups comparing stacks, documenting best practices, or summarizing papers.

5. Run events

   • Host hack nights, reading groups, or live-teleop demos.
   • Share slide decks and recordings via PRs so other nodes can reuse them.

Repository Layout (proposed)

.
├── README.md              # You are here
├── docs/                  # Longer-form design docs & standards
├── index.html             # GitHub Pages / website source
├── img                    # Images, logos, etc.
├── examples/              # Example configs, build guides, curriculum
└── org/                   # Templates for new nodes, proposals, etc.

Appendix

Comparison of Representative Robotics Systems

Table 2: Summary of representative mobile manipulation and humanoid systems and their properties (demo type, open-sourced [OPEN], bi-manual mobile manipulation [BiMaMo] , fully autonomous vs teleoperation [Auto], and low-cost feasibility - less than $1K [LoCo]).