Nori Bot: $947 Mobile Manipulator with 600mm Floor-to-Counter Lift

Open-source mobile manipulators have historically topped out around $660 but share three crippling limitations: fixed-height workspaces, reactive-only control, and lack of protection against stall-induced servo burnout. The Nori Bot, developed as a Columbia University Deep Learning Robot Manipulation course project (Spring 2026), addresses all three while coming in at just $947 — roughly 3% the cost of comparable commercial platforms.

The system packs a 17-degree-of-freedom dual-arm configuration with a 600mm Z-axis lift that extends the existing servo bus for true floor-to-counter reach. Instead of a high-end compute module, Nori Bot runs on a thin-client Raspberry Pi 4 paired with the OpenClaw proactive agent runtime, enabling cron jobs and hooks to trigger physical tasks autonomously rather than relying on reactive commands. A key innovation is the software safety stack: it uses sensorless grip-force feedback by monitoring motor current on soft TPU fingers, which protects the cheap Feetech servos from stall-induced burnout. All code, CAD files, and the skill manifest are being released open-source, making high-capability mobile manipulation accessible to labs, makers, and educators with minimal budgets.