Hoplings are palm-sized cube robots with expressive faces. They skitter around your desk, learn the room, and talk to each other in a beep language you will find yourself understanding. A small hub called the Nest is their shared brain, shared memory and charging pad, and nothing about them runs in the cloud.
Most desk robots are one lonely gadget waiting for a command. Hoplings come as three, and the comedy comes from the same place it does with pets: they react to each other, to you, and to whatever shows up in the room.
A 48 mm cube with a round screen for a face, a camera, a microphone, a speaker and vibration drive. About $50 in parts.
A Raspberry Pi running local AI models through the Cactus inference engine. It labels objects, recognises voices, keeps the shared map, directs the group, and is the charging pad.
Forty tokens of beeps and whistles. The same message goes over Wi-Fi and out of the speaker, so people and robots hear the same thing.
Every Chirp token has a fixed sound signature, pitched to each robot's own voice. Pip is high and quick, Bort is low and grumbly, Mo is somewhere in between and laughs easily. Say the same phrase and you will recognise it every time, which is what makes the arguments funny. Signed-in visitors can hear each token and watch three of them talk on their own in the simulator.
Enthusiastic about everything. First to announce a new object, first to volunteer for a dare.
Complains, sulks when he bumps into things, and files complaints about cats. Usually right about the mug.
Half asleep, laughs easily, and settles the arguments the other two start.
Everything below is specified in the white paper and modelled in the simulator, with the conversation rules, personalities and shared map running as real code.
Six exchange shapes so far: checking in, name games, dares, teasing the third one, and arguments about who saw the mug first.
Curious, happy, surprised, grumpy, sleepy, alarmed, smug, loading, and a very good stare.
One leads, the others follow. When the leader hits something it sulks and the one at the back takes over.
They wander toward unvisited spots. Anywhere a robot gets stuck is marked on the map, and after two incidents the whole group avoids it.
A robot that sees something new asks the Nest what it is and announces it. The others learn its location by listening.
Say your name once and every Hopling knows you by voice. Opt-in and deletable.
Two robots that chat swap everything they know.
Low battery triggers a walk to the pad. They wake up in the morning and say hello.
The Nest can read email and social mentions and draft replies in the right robot's voice, from the actual event log, with a human approving each one by default.
Every part is off the shelf. The robot is a single ESP32-S3 module with an integrated camera and mic, a round display, two coin vibration motors and a 500 mAh cell, in a two-part 3D-printed shell with a shock-mounted inner sled. The heavy thinking lives on the Nest, which is what keeps the robot this small.
No. The Nest, a small hub in your home, runs every model locally. Camera frames and audio never leave the local network. The only optional outside connection is the message agent, which an owner can enable to let the robots answer their own email and social mentions.
A language of about forty beep-and-whistle tokens. Each token has a fixed sound signature pitched to each robot's own voice: Pip is high and quick, Bort is low and grumbly, Mo is somewhere in between and laughs easily. The same message goes over Wi-Fi and out of the speaker, so people and robots hear the same thing, and you learn it by ear.
Because the comedy comes from the same place it does with pets. They react to each other, to you and to whatever shows up in the room. One leads and the others form a line; when the leader hits something it sulks and the one at the back takes over. Two that chat swap everything they know, so a mug found by one becomes a mug avoided by all.
Yes. Say your name once and every Hopling knows you by voice, greets you with your own jingle, and gets suspicious of strangers at night. Voice enrolment is opt-in and deletable.
A single ESP32-S3 module with an integrated camera and microphone, a round display, two coin vibration motors for movement and a 500 mAh cell, in a two-part 3D-printed shell with a shock-mounted inner sled. Every part is off the shelf. The heavy thinking lives on the Nest, which is what keeps the robot this small.
At prototype quantities the parts come to about $50 per robot and about $300 for a full three-robot system including the Nest. Retail pricing is not set.
Not yet. The specification is complete and the simulator runs the real behaviour rules in a browser. Three working prototypes come next, then a twenty-unit pilot with families and classrooms. Create an account and request access to try the simulator and follow the build.
Hoplings is being built in the open with a small group of collaborators and early supporters. Create a free ZeroState Labs account, request access, and once it is approved this address opens up to: