Hello Robot Receives Nearly $3M for Assistive Robotics

The people who receive care and the people who provide it are getting a say in the next applications built for Hello Robot. The Martinez, California robotics company has received a nearly $3M National Institute on Aging grant to develop and evaluate its Stretch robot with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Announced September 29, 2026, the Phase IIB Small Business Innovation Research project focuses on older adults with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's dementia.

The funding supports research toward commercialization, including work on cognitive assistance, social engagement and safety management. For the care organizations and families who might eventually use these applications, the important part is the opportunity to learn how robotic help fits into a continuing human relationship. Usefulness, trust and acceptance become questions the product team has to examine alongside the machine's capabilities.

Hello Robot's cofounders, CEO Aaron Edsinger and CTO Charlie Kemp, bring the robotics side of that work. University researcher Wendy A. Rogers is a principal investigator alongside Aaron Edsinger, connecting the technology to expertise in aging and human factors. The project makes room for the people affected by the proposed applications to help shape them, giving physical AI a more demanding audience than a demonstration video.

What Hello Robot's NIH Grant Funds

The new award comes from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, and covers nearly $3M over a three-year research program. The project began September 22, 2026, and is expected to continue through May 2029. Hello Robot's announcement describes the work as a Phase IIB SBIR project, an important distinction for readers tracking capital: this is a research grant with specified development goals, rather than an announced equity financing.

The university's Human Factors and Aging Laboratory independently identifies the Phase IIB project and confirms Wendy A. Rogers and Aaron Edsinger as principal investigators. Charlie Kemp participates as a co-investigator with university researchers Raksha Mudar and Harshal Mahajan. The combination brings different kinds of expertise to a product whose user experience includes perception, movement, cognition and interpersonal expectations.

This award follows earlier NIH-supported work on Stretch. The government's prior Phase II award record lists $2,537,474 for the 2023 award year, with a project beginning in December 2022. That historical amount belongs to an earlier phase; it should not be substituted for the nearly $3M announced in September or presented as a newly verified corporate funding total.

The continuity gives the new research a specific starting point. Hello Robot and Illinois have already worked on physical and cognitive assistance with a senior living partner. The current program extends the inquiry toward sustained use, where a promising interaction has to survive repetition, changing needs and the ordinary interruptions of a home or care setting.

How Stretch Connects Robotics to Everyday Care

Stretch is a mobile manipulator: a robot that can move through a space and use an arm to interact with objects. Hello Robot's current Stretch 4 specifications describe an open-source ROS 2 and Python development environment, calibrated hardware and self-charging. These are practical building blocks for researchers and application developers, who need ways to program behavior, inspect what happened and keep equipment available across repeated sessions.

The design also carries a choice about where complexity should live. A compact mobile base and telescoping arm give developers a platform to adapt to particular tasks without requiring a human-shaped body. For a researcher studying interaction with older adults, the relevant question becomes how that physical configuration fits a person's surroundings, preferences and ways of asking for help.

Hello Robot introduced Stretch 4 in May 2026 at a listed hardware price of $29,950. The launch positioned the machine for researchers, developers and application engineers. A future care service would involve its own decisions about training, support, supervision and maintenance, so the platform price alone cannot describe what a care organization would pay to make assistance part of daily operations.

That gap gives the grant commercial relevance before it produces a finished service. A buyer needs to understand the application around the robot, including the people responsible for introducing it and responding when it needs help. Research into everyday use can give a product team a more concrete basis for those conversations, while preserving the user's own role in deciding which forms of assistance are welcome.

What Older Adults and Care Partners Help Determine

The program will involve 60 older adults, care partners and professional care staff in participatory design research. Its proposed applications include reminders, guidance through activities, help locating everyday objects, social interaction and support for daily routines. These are plans for development and evaluation, with clinical benefit and reduced caregiving workload remaining outcomes to investigate.

Initial work will take place at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, a University of Illinois facility that includes a home simulation environment. Later evaluations are planned for homes and care settings, with professional care staff using Stretch over an eight-week period. Lindsey Communities continues as a core research partner following the team's earlier collaboration with ClarkLindsey.

The study design makes the care relationship visible inside the engineering process. An older adult can judge an interaction by whether it helps preserve a chosen routine; a care partner can judge it by how dependable the assistance feels; a staff member can judge it alongside other responsibilities. Those judgments can overlap without being identical, and a product team needs room to hear the differences before deciding what to build next.

For Hello Robot, the grant finances work at that meeting point between application development and daily life. Aaron Edsinger and Charlie Kemp founded the company in 2017, and its current company profile identifies offices in Martinez and Atlanta, with manufacturing in Martinez. The next stage brings that engineering organization into longer conversations with older adults, families and staff, each with a different part of the day that Stretch might help them reclaim.