HEBI Robotics

HEBI Robotics, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a Carnegie Mellon University spinout founded in 2014 that develops modular, reconfigurable robotics hardware and software — creating actuator-level building blocks that researchers, engineers, and space mission designers can assemble into custom robotic arms, manipulators, and mobile platforms without traditional custom mechanical design.

HEBI's core product is the HEBI Actuator — a self-contained module integrating a brushless DC motor, harmonic drive gearbox, encoder, motor controller, and communication interface into a standardized cylindrical form factor that snaps together with companion structural components. Each actuator communicates via standard Ethernet UDP protocols, is controllable via HEBI's open-source SDK available in MATLAB, Python, C++, and ROS 2, and provides real-time torque, velocity, and position control with integrated impedance and admittance control modes. This modular architecture allows a robotics team to design a 4-DOF gripper arm for one mission and reconfigure the same actuators into a 7-DOF manipulation arm for another — dramatically reducing development time and hardware cost compared to custom actuation systems.

In 2025, HEBI Robotics entered a NASA partnership to develop space-rated modular robotic building blocks for autonomous lunar surface operations, specifically targeting the construction and maintenance of lunar rail infrastructure — a concept for cargo transport on the Moon's surface — and habitat assembly tasks that require repetitive, precision manipulation in dusty, thermally extreme environments without human oversight. The partnership reflects NASA's interest in modular robotic architectures for the Artemis lunar program, where mission versatility and field-repairability of robotic assets are critical.

HEBI competes with traditional industrial robotics suppliers (Universal Robots, Kinova) and academic modular robotics platforms, but differentiates through its space-oriented engineering roadmap, proximity to Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute for talent and research collaboration, and an SDK ecosystem designed for rapid deployment by non-specialist engineers.