// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Launch HN: Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) – Build scalable robotics data pipelines
Open source SDK for scalable multimodal data pipelines in robotics and physical AI
Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) is building HFlow, an open source SDK for scalable
multimodal data pipelines in robotics and physical AI. It makes data tooling and
practices typically developed inside large robotics teams accessible to teams of
any size.
We believe processing data is a major bottleneck in robotics. A corpus can combine
video, state, actions, timestamps, and metadata from many recording systems. Teams
often feel the problem first in quality control: determining whether cameras froze,
streams drifted out of sync, required topics disappeared, or duplicate recordings
entered the corpus. As the corpus grows, fragmented scripts make it difficult to
know what ran, audit the results, or reproduce a dataset.
Teams can start with HFlow's built-in checks, write new transformations, checks,
labels, and enrichments, or connect processing code they already use. HFlow handles
the orchestration, storage, versioning, and curation around those steps.
HFlow stamps each processed episode with its provenance, renders the pipeline
as a graph, and records metadata and quality evidence in a queryable catalog.
You can trace how outputs were produced, monitor every stage, and
investigate a corpus without loading the underlying recordings.
MCAP is HFlow's v1 input and output boundary because it efficiently stores
and serves synchronized video, state, action, and other time-series streams.
That format requirement does not define where the data comes from: human-worn
cameras, teleoperated robots, autonomous policies, and other collection systems
can all feed the pipeline once their data is represented as a supported MCAP
episode.
Status: pre-v1, with the core lifecycle working end to end. HFlow is ready to try locally. See what is implemented and open issues for current details and remaining work.
Help grow the open robotics community. Star the repository, share it with your network, or contribute. Our goal is an open source community where anyone can participate in building the future of robotics. No robot hardware is required to contribute.
Human and robot data move through a four-stage lifecycle:
Open DuckDB's browser over the catalog at any time, including before the first
run starts: