An open-source home robot can be 3D-printed, remotely operated, and trained to perform household tasks such as folding different types of clothing.
Sourccey is a personal home robot from US startup Vulcan Robotics, founded by Nick Maselli. Its hardware, electrical and software designs are available as open-source resources, with blueprints available for download. The robot is 1,030 mm tall and weighs just under 16 kg, with most of its body 3D-printed in PLA using a desktop Bambu printer.
The robot uses four mecanum wheels that enable it to move in any direction. The robot has two arms with five degrees of freedom each and a gripper. It uses a Raspberry Pi 5 for its onboard computing, four cameras, and a 360-degree LiDAR sensor to sense its surroundings. The robot runs on a 12 V LiFePO4 battery rated for around 5,000 cycles.
Sourccey can be remotely controlled through a pair of control arms that match the robot arms or through an Oculus Quest. Users can record demonstrations of tasks performed by the robot and use the collected data to train a model. Sourccey comes with four folding models for different types of clothes, such as T-shirts, shorts, jeans, and long shirts.
The project’s hardware, electrical, and software designs are available on GitHub. Public STL files are also available for users to 3D-print their own replacement parts. Users are thus able to tinker with both the hardware and the software of the robot. The combination of 3D printing capabilities, teleoperation, and model training allows for adaptation for various household chores.
According to Vulcan Robotics, the platform is set to go open-source in August 2026. The first robots are scheduled to ship in September. The project utilises a Raspberry Pi 5-based computational system, various sensors, articulated arms, and task training using machine learning to come up with a household robot.
