Symbion

Video Demo

About this project

Everyone is chasing the one perfect do-everything robot. We think that is the wrong bet. The future of robotics is a team of cheap, limited robots that cover each other's weaknesses, run by one brain that understands what each body can and cannot do, then composes them into something bigger than either one alone. Symbion is that idea, built and running. Two robots, one shared brain. Noma is a Hiwonder MasterPi: a mecanum-wheeled base with a 5-DOF arm and gripper. Noma is the grabber. It drives to objects, picks them up for search and rescue, and reacts when you greet it. Nyxie is a Freenove hexapod. Nyxie is the communicator. It waves, moves its head when you speak to it, and uses a buzzer to show it is happy. The brain lives on a laptop orchestrator built with FastAPI, and it fronts both robots over a shared network. What makes it interesting is that the brain is two LLMs, Claude and Gemini, and you can switch between them live. You can literally watch one LLM drive one robot while the other drives the other, or have them compete. Gemini handles natural language understanding and voice, so you can hold a button in the app, speak a command, and the system transcribes it, understands it, decides which robot is the right tool for the job, and acts. Vision runs through OpenCV so Noma can find and approach an object. Everything is controlled from a phone app we built in Expo and React Native. You see both robots, their live status, the active LLM, and you can talk to them or trigger their behaviors directly. The hard part was never the hardware. It was teaching one brain to reason about two very different bodies with very real limits, low-cost servos, a base that sags under load, legs that fight calibration, and still get them to cooperate as a single system. That is the whole point. Not one expensive robot that does everything, but a team of robots.

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