RoboAPI
A unified REST API for robots, like Stripe but for hardware
Details
- External ID
- 47896975
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- RoboAPI
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.62146529562982
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Every robot manufacturer ships a different SDK and a different protocol. A Boston Dynamics Spot speaks nothing like a Universal Robots arm. Every team building on top of robots rewrites the same integration layer from scratch. This is a massive tax on the industry.RoboAPI is a unified API layer that abstracts all of that into one clean developer experience. One SDK, one API key, any robot — simulated or real hardware.You can connect a simulated robot and read live telemetry in under 5 minutes: pip install fastapi uvicorn roslibpy uvicorn api.main:app --reload curl -X POST localhost:8000/v1/robots/connect -d '{"robot_id":"bot-01","brand":"simulated"}' curl localhost:8000/v1/robots/bot-01/sense It also connects to real ROS2 robots via rosbridge — I tested it today controlling a turtlesim robot drawing circles through the API.The architecture is pluggable — each robot brand is a separate adapter implementing a common interface (like a payment gateway in Stripe). Adding a new brand means one file.Currently supports: simulated robots and any ROS2 robot. Boston Dynamics and Universal Robots adapters are next.Would love feedback from anyone working in robotics — especially on the API design and what's missing for real-world use.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Roblox scripting and modding utilities
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Marketplace
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- unified api for robot control
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a universal abstraction layer for disparate robotics hardware requires physical access to expensive robots, deep embedded systems engineering, and low-latency real-time control protocols.
What it would actually take: Requires a distributed edge gateway architecture communicating with heterogeneous industrial buses (CAN, EtherCAT, ROS/ROS2, vendor-specific gRPC/TCP protocols) paired with high-level REST/WebSocket cloud endpoints. The difficult engineering lies in deterministic real-time control, safety-critical interlocking, kinematics translation, and physical device driver reverse-engineering. Demands physical robotic hardware labs and specialized mechatronics/robotics firmware engineers.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ROS (Robot Operating System), Transitive Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Universal Robots
Concerns raised: REST is inefficient for robot interactions; pub/sub or blackboard patterns are more natural, Manufacturers resistant to opening robots to standardization, Fragmented adoption of ROS outside academia despite it being the standard
Feature requests: Move commands from REST to pub/sub architecture, Blackboard pattern implementation for fleet layer, MQTT for commands alongside WebSocket telemetry
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 53 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 54 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 161 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sowbot · hn · 2026-02-23 · 181 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- KeyoAPI · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- ManiLoop · github · 2026-09-16 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Aktoria Robotics is the teleoperation layer to speed up robot deployments · yc · 2026-08-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Tensr - Robotic Factories that Build Robots from Humanoids to Robots for the International Space Station · yc · 2026-08-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Browse 61 3D Printable Robots · hn · 2026-05-14 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot · hn · 2026-01-27 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- franka-stack · github · 2026-09-26 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.