Manifesto

Introduction

Robotics is at its Altair moment.

Hardware is finally cheap enough to build at home.
Teleoperation is accessible.
Learning from data works.

What’s missing isn’t intelligence or capital, it’s shared culture, shared standards, and a place for builders to coordinate.

The personal computer revolution didn’t start with trillion-dollar companies (IBM cough cough). It started with kits, clubs, open architectures, and people teaching themselves how things worked. Robotics is now at the same inflection point.

HBRN exists to make sure we don’t miss it.

What We Do

The HomeBrew Robotics Network is a community and coordination layer for open, low-cost, reproducible robotics.

We are inspired by projects that proved openness still lives on:

• Bitcoin — permissionless networks can last and coordinate without a central owner
• Wikipedia — decentralized communities can produce shared, trusted knowledge
• Linux — open systems can outperform closed ones at scale
• MIT SOUL — access to great resources creates confidence, agency, and the ability to learn anything

Our goal isn’t just to distribute information, it’s to help people feel that they can learn anything, and therefore build anything.

Knowledge creates agency. Agency creates builders. Builders create the future.

Vision

We believe robotics, arguably humanity’s most powerful technological invention, should not be owned, gated, or controlled by a handful of corporations.

We want a world where:

• Anyone can realistically learn and build a capable robot
• Open standards make systems interoperable
• Builders can start small and scale up
• Many companies compete on top of shared infrastructure
• No single entity owns the interface between humans and machines

Just as Linux underpins modern computing and Wikipedia underpins shared knowledge, robotics needs a commons.

Why Indie Beats Blockbusters

The most interesting games aren’t sequels.
The most interesting films aren’t franchises.
The most important software isn’t closed.

Indie creators optimize for truth, taste, and experimentation. Large institutions optimize for risk minimization and control.

Robotics today often looks like Hollywood: carefully staged demos, massive budgets, closed stacks, and little reproducibility. But the breakthroughs are happening elsewhere: university labs, hobbyist communities, indie builders, open-source projects, people willing to fail in public.

HBRN is where those people meet.

What Big Companies Are Good For (and What They Aren’t)

We are not anti-company. We are anti-lock-in.

Large organizations are great at:

• Manufacturing at scale
• Compute and foundation models
• Safety research and guidelines
• Funding infrastructure

They should support open ecosystems, not own them.

Robotics needs neutral standards, open interfaces, and permissionless experimentation. HBRN exists so the future of robotics is shaped by many hands, not dictated by a few.

In One Sentence

HBRN is building the Linux, the Wikipedia, and the HomeBrew Club of Robotics.

Projects

Metal2Humanoid — open-sourcing the process of going from raw metal to actuators to a fully reproducible humanoid build. Think NAND2Tetris, (but for robotics) starting from first principles and ending with a working humanoid system.
(Link to outline)

OSH Atlas (pronounced “Oh-Ss”) — An open atlas of humanoid robotics projects, resources, and communities maintained within HBRN, focused on low-cost, reproducible hardware, shared interfaces, and community-driven iteration. The name draws inspiration from Oshi Shinobu or simply put in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu “Oss”.
(Link to Osh)

UMOJA — Universal Modular Open Joint Assessment. A shared checklist and benchmark for humanoid projects: testing mind (basic reasoning + navigation + locomotion + manipulation tasks), body (a “Military PT test” for robotics: strength, speed, stability, endurance), and soul (whether the project is truly open — e.g., CERN-OHL or equivalent licensing + reproducible documentation).
(Link to UMOJA description)

HBRN — the network itself. A shared Discord and growing community for meetups, demos, standards, and shared infrastructure. (Join Discord →)

Team

• Willie McClinton

Let us know if you want to be added to this list — we’re always looking to grow our core team.

Contribute

Join Discord, pick a project, document a build, add an Atlas entry, or start a local meetup node.

Join Discord →