For investors
Barycenter Lab is a robotics lab in Berlin, founded in 2026 by three engineers. Our first robot, Kiko, is a small home robot for one person. It knows its owner, stays close, and keeps what it sees on the robot.
What we believe
Robots are moving into homes. Most of them do not know who they are for. A follow-me robot drives to the nearest person. A home camera uploads what it sees.
We think a robot that lives with you has to know you, stay with you, and keep what it sees at home. That is the whole company.
Why now
Compute. The whole stack, vision, speech and behaviour, runs today on a Jetson Orin Nano Super: 67 TOPS at 25 watts, developer kit at a 249 dollar list price. The same kit cost 499 dollars and did 40 TOPS when it launched in 2023.
The category is opening. In 2026 the first home robots go on sale, at the top end for 20,000 dollars. Kiko sits at the other end: small, one job, done well.
Privacy is a product feature. A camera robot in a home is a data protection question first, in Europe above all. Kiko answers it in hardware: nothing leaves the robot. That is easier to build and to sell from Berlin than from anywhere else.
What works today.
Every feature shows how far it really is. Nothing moves up a level before it runs on the robot.
Working
Working- Knows its owner (face and body, learned at setup)
- Stays with you at a set distance, through turns and past other people
- Answers to its name with a short sentence
- Shows what it is doing on its face
- Vision, speech and behaviour run on the robot
- Depth vision on the GPU
In testing
In testing- Records a 60 second reel on command
- Camera mast rises, turns a full circle, lowers
- Keeps you in frame
- Touch on head, left and right
- About 70 minutes per charge
- Other faces are not saved
Planned
Planned- Publish the owner recognition measurements
- Owner app with live view, reels, battery and moods
- Kiko v2, smaller and cheaper
Nothing leaves the robot
Scenarios we test
Every recording follows a script that makes the owner hard to keep. We publish the numbers when they are real.
- In progress
01
Turn around
The owner turns away. No face to see.
- In progress
02
Jacket change
Same person, different clothes.
- In progress
03
Occlusion
Someone walks between Kiko and its owner.
- In progress
04
Similar clothing
Two people in the same outfit.
- In progress
05
Leave and return
The owner leaves the room and comes back.
- In progress
06
Low light
Evening light, lamps only.
What we measure
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Identity switches | Measuring |
| Time to re-find the owner | Measuring |
| Time the owner is lost | Measuring |
| Follow-distance error | Measuring |
| Frame rate on the robot | Measuring |
Measuring on the robot. Numbers appear here first, before any paper.
Where we are going
Now
Kiko v1 in Berlin
Building the first Kiko in Berlin. Owner recognition, following, voice and a face.
Next
Publish what we measured
We publish how Kiko finds its owner and what we measured.
Later
Owner app and Kiko v2
An owner app, then a smaller and cheaper Kiko shaped by what v1 teaches.
The team
Aryan Kumar Singh
Co-founder · AI and Robotics Lead
Builds Kiko end to end: the body in Fusion 360 and on the 3D printer, the boards and wiring, and the perception and behaviour stack on a Jetson running ROS 2. Before Barycenter Lab he was Founding AI Engineer at EMRA AI and Product Manager and Technical Lead at Mioneer. MSc Artificial Intelligence, Berlin. Two IEEE papers.
Khasim Bin Saleh
Co-founder · AI Engineer
Builds Kiko's owner recognition: finding people in the depth image, tracking them over time and telling the owner apart from everyone else, all on the Jetson. Before Kiko he shipped an AI tutor to more than 1,000 beta users as a machine learning intern at Coschool and built retrieval pipelines for language models. He also builds Klindok, offline documentation software for German medical practices. Co-inventor on a patent application for a connected pet feeder (2023). MSc Computer Science with a focus on Big Data and AI, SRH Berlin.
Saurabh Kumar
Co-founder · Robotics and Electronics Engineer
Electrical engineer, now a robotics and AI researcher.