Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Matic: A reimagined robot vacuum that actually works
Hello HN friends, We’re Matician, and here’s why we built Matic. We wanted to live in an always clean home but were tired of always cleaning. We’d spend hours cleaning, but with kids and pets, the floors never stayed clean for long. We tried all the various robovacs, but they actually made things worse. They chewed up wires, got lost searching for the dock, and one even tore up an expensive rug after getting stuck on it for an hour! And we weren’t the only ones — friends and family had similar frustrations. So we decided to build something new from the ground up. Something that would just……
Matic is a robot vacuum designed to handle homes with kids and pets without the frustrations of traditional robovacs. Built by Matician, it addresses common problems like getting stuck on rugs, tangling in wires, and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Matic: A reimagined robot vacuum that actually works launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MR
Hi HN! We're Matician (https://matician.com/) 5.5 years ago, we started building an autonomous home robot with these goals: * Reliable autonomy — no user interventions, it should just work * Everything on the device — no cloud storage or compute, robot-to-app data through local WiFi * Usefulness — solve a genuine problem that will impact real people To achieve this, we * wrote the robot's software stack in Rust * used only RGB cameras and Mics as input — humans can navigate with only these sensors, so why can’t a robot? * developed SLAM and computer vision algorithms that run…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 2WB
Building and deploying navigation algorithms on a home robot vacuum cleaner
Apr 2026 · indraneelpatil.github.io · its alternatives →
- 3OR
Hi all, excited to share our latest work, OK-Robot, which is an open and modular framework to perform navigation and manipulation with a robot assistant in practically any homes without having to teach the robot anything new! You can simply unbox the target robot, install OK-Robot, give it a "scan" (think a 60 second iPhone video), and start asking the robot to move arbitrary things from A to B. We already tested it out in 10 home environments in New York city, and one environment each in Pittsburgh and Fremont. We based everything off of the current best machine learning models, and so…
2024 · ok-robot.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4MP
Hey, we’re Axel and Vignesh, cofounders of Innate (https://www.innate.bot/). We just launched MARS, a general-purpose robot with an open onboard agentic OS built on top of ROS2. Overview: https://youtu.be/GEOMYDXv6pE Control demo: https://youtu.be/_Cw5fGa8i3s Videos of autonomous use-cases: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-example-use-cases Quickstart: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-quick-start. Our last thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451707 When we started we felt…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 5
Hello, we're Max and Byran from MUREX Robotics, a high school robotics team from Exeter, New Hampshire. We are super proud to have made this open source piece of technology! It is only 6.9 dollars (actually!) from JLCPCB :) I hope you like it. You can find us at [email protected] and [email protected] as well if you have any questions. We will be putting a small run of these boards for sale somewhere (we have <25 units of stock), probably for $10+shipping. Let us know if you're interested in more! Board files for everything we make is here:…
2024 · docs.murexrobotics.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hi HN! Proud to share our open-source robot platform, Dobb·E, a home robot system that needs just 5 minutes of human teaching to learn new tasks. We've already taken Dobb·E to 10 different homes in New York, taught it 100+ tasks, and we are just getting started! I would love to hear your thoughts about this. Here are some more details, below (or see a Twitter thread with attached media: https://twitter.com/i/status/1729515379892826211 or https://nitter.net/i/status/1729515379892826211): We engineered Dobb·E to maximize efficiency, safety, and…
2023 · dobb-e.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10LC
2016 · runmyrobot.com · its alternatives →
- 11
2019 · youtube.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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- 16
I built a mechanical computer kit: https://whomtech.com/show-hn tl;dr: it's a cellular automaton on a "loom" of alternating bars, using contoured tiles to guide marbles through logic gates. It's not just "Turing complete, job done"; I've tried to make it actually practical. Devices are compact, e.g. you can fit a binary adder into a 3cm square. It took me nearly two years and dozens of different approaches. There's a sequence of interactive tutorials to try out, demo videos, and a janky simulator. I've also sent out a few prototype kits and have some more ready to go. Please…
2025 · whomtech.com · its alternatives →
- 17PG
2020 · yoga.dev · its alternatives →
- 18
Roomba i7+ ▲87Wi-Fi connected robot vacuum with automatic dirt disposal
2019 · shop.irobot.ie · its alternatives →
- 19
Lucy▲201A smart robot that bends sunlight where you want it.
2015 · preorderlucy.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Hopper▲100Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877517.) Today we’re launching Hopper, an agentic development environment for mainframes. You can download it here: https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper, and you can also request access and immediately get a mainframe user account to play with. There's also a video runthrough at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81L5DcfBvE.…
May 2026 · hypercubic.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
Viberia▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →
- 22
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How to Make a CHIP Robot. In this tutorial we walk you through how to build and make a C.H.I.P. robot with the $9 Computer.
2016 · dexterindustries.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Also compare
- Matic Robot – A privacy-preserving autonomous home robot built w/ Rust alternatives
- We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than $300 (well almost) alternatives
- OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere alternatives
- MARS – Personal AI robot for builders (< $2k) alternatives
- We made a small and cheap network switch alternatives
- Dobb·E – towards home robots with an open-source platform alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →