Meet Flourish One, the Raspberry Pi-powered humanoid built for busy parents

Flourish One is now available. The company is promising an easy-to-use training interface. | Credit: Flourish

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

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

Most humanoid and mobile-manipulator startups are chasing factory or warehouse work, where environments are structured, and data is plentiful. Flourish is deliberately taking on the messier challenge of the home.

Marcel’s thesis is that every household’s routines, layouts, and standards of cleanliness are too idiosyncratic for a one-size-fits-all generalist model, so Flourish One fine-tunes its skills task by task, home by home, 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 handle real chores, even as a tiny team hand-builds the initial 50 units to learn what domestic robotics really looks like outside the lab.

The company was founded in January of this year and represents another humanoid company coming to market in less than 12 months.

Marcel is obsessed with time management and told The Robot Report , “I’ve automated everything in my computer. … But when I came home, the most painful stuff in my life was still there.”

When asked why start with the 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 fine-tunes per-task, per-home.

“The way I tidy my apartment is not the same as you do in your house. You’re going to show it for 30 minutes how to water your plants,” he said. “We’re going to fine-tune an AI model for that… now the robot is able to do that in your house.”

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Flourish One has a wheeled base and two arms

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

“We chose 1.5 kg because in homes, the majority of tasks don’t need a huge payload,” noted Marcel.

For obstacle detection, the robot uses a small lidar, located on the base near the floor. Each of the two-fingered grippers has a wrist-mounted camera for manipulation tasks.

This closeup of a prototype Flourish One shows the wrist camera orientation. | Credit: Flourish

Flourish One is not waterproof; it won’t do any dishes or wash the dog in its first generation. The robot has limited dexterity but is suitable for tidying, trash, and basic cleaning such as wiping a table, but not intricate assembly.

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

The architecture will use cloud GPUs for the training of skill models and inference for higher–level behaviors. It will require a network connection for “thinking,” or users can 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, it would immediately double the cost,” he said.

Smartphone app to enable robot training

The company is developing a smartphone app that will use the 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 is magical with Flourish,” according to Marcel. “When you are training your robot to water your plants, you just take your phone, move your phone, and it will move the arms. We don’t need any more other hardware.”

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