Handeware Robots
Microdroids
Small robots that live on a desk or a shelf and do one useful thing well, instead of one impressive thing badly.
Why small
Consumer robotics keeps trying to build a household general-purpose machine, and the results are expensive, fragile, and quietly retired after a year. The robots that survived in people’s homes did the opposite. A robot vacuum is not intelligent. It is cheap, it does one job, and it does it while you are out.
That is the shape we are interested in. Small enough to sit on a desk. Cheap enough that it is not a decision. Narrow enough that it actually works.
What exists today
A working prototype. It moves, it senses, it runs code I wrote, and I am genuinely excited about it! But it is not a product: no enclosure worth showing, no manufacturing plan, no price. Anyone who tells you the gap between those two things is small has not crossed it.
I would rather say that plainly than put a render and a countdown on a page. When there is something to buy, this is where it will appear.
What we are trying to get right
- It works without an account. The same rule our apps follow. A robot that stops working when a company’s server goes away is a rental with extra steps.
- It works without the internet. Whatever thinking it does happens on the device. On-device machine learning is good enough now that shipping video to a data centre to identify a desk is a choice, not a requirement.
- It is repairable. Screws, not glue. Published parts. A small robot that cannot be opened is landfill on a delay.
- One job. I would rather ship something narrow that works than something broad that demos.
Tell me what it should do
I have an answer already, and I hold it loosely. If you have a specific thing you would want a small robot to handle — on a desk, in a workshop, around a house — that is genuinely more useful to me right now than a signature on a waiting list.
Join the list. Email support@handeware.com with “Microdroids” in the subject and I will write when there is something real to show. No money, no obligation, and I will not send you anything else.
Who is building it
Handeware is me: a one-person studio that ships small, honest software — Sift, Chartra and a free Mahjong game, all of which run without accounts and without sending your data anywhere. The robots come from the same place: build the small version properly rather than the large version approximately.