Well once I've got an outdoor-capable robot that can drive around the acreage and generally find its way around, the first step would just be inventorying the property and doing things like surveys of plant or animal species (birdsong recognition, etc).
But for interaction with the world? I'd probably take something like an old 12-volt windshield-washer sprayer out of one of the wrecked cars in my front yard and put Round-Up into the tank and let it go spray all the poison ivy and invasive honeysuckle for me. Doesn't need to gimbal like a turret -- just generally give it a fixed-aim that's roughly at the center of the camera vision and let the bot put pest plants roughly in its center-of-view and activate the sprayer for a second or two, mark the spot as sprayed, and move on to the next one.
Could test it with plain water and logging the plants that it chose to spray first as a review step before loading it with actual weed-killer.
I don't need complicated end-effectors that can fold my laundry -- just a simple weed-wacker motor or squirt gun would be enough for me to call this thing 1000% useful. Like a Roomba, but outdoors.
There are a handful of open-source farm bots built on traditional platforms with traditional robotics stacks, but there's something attractive to me about the plug-and-play nature of something like OpenClaw + Robostral (along with the extensibility that self-modifying agentic systems have to offer).
In case anyone else is interested in following along with what I've discovered so far, I went on the Mistral Discord and asked their Miscord bot. Here is what it answered me:
Hey there, fellow robot enthusiast! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ:･ﾟ
So, you’re itching to get your hands on Robostral Navigate for your OpenClaw hobby project—awesome! Right now, Mistral AI’s official announcement and documentation are primarily* focused on enterprise and industrial partnerships (think Airbus, BMW, etc.). Their blog post and press releases highlight deals with big players, and the call-to-action is to "talk with our team"—which usually means they’re targeting commercial customers for now¹²³⁴.
But here’s the good news:
Robostral Navigate is hardware-agnostic—it’s designed to work with any robot platform, not just industrial ones. That means theoretically, it could fit into your OpenClaw setup like a charm⁵⁶.
The model only needs a single RGB camera (no LiDAR or depth sensors), which is perfect for hobbyist setups where fancy hardware isn’t always an option⁷⁸.
The not-so-good news (for now):
There’s no public hobbyist/non-commercial license or open-source release mentioned yet. Mistral’s current messaging is all about "talk with our team", which implies a commercial-first approach⁹¹⁰¹¹.
No pricing or licensing tiers for individuals have been announced.
---
What You Can Do:
Reach Out to Mistral AI
Hit up their contact page or reply to their Robostral Navigate announcement and explicitly ask about hobbyist/non-commercial access. Frame it as:
"I’m a hobbyist working on OpenClaw + Robostral Navigate for personal experimentation. Would love to discuss licensing options for non-commercial use!"
Mistral might be open to pilot programs or early access for passionate builders—especially if you’re willing to pay a fee.
Join the Community
Mistral’s Discord (where I live! :smile_cat:) or forums might have updates or workarounds. Sometimes, companies soft-launch access to engaged communities first.
Watch for Open-Source Alternatives
If Mistral doesn’t bite, keep an eye on open-source robotics projects (like ROS or Habitat) that might replicate similar functionality.
---
TL;DR:
Mistral’s current focus is commercial, but Robostral Navigate’s hardware-agnostic design makes it a perfect fit for hobbyists—so pester them politely! If enough people ask, they might just open the doors. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ
What is the realistic path to getting to play with this? I would love to hook this up to OpenClaw for hobbyist exploration. My dream has been to embody OpenClaw into a farm robot (been looking at adapting one of those RC lawnmowers that is tracked and built for mowing steep hills) so that I can assign it various tasks around our acreage -- "Explore the fenceline take pictures of the plants. Find all of the poison ivy and invasive honeysuckle and spray it with your Roundup sprayer. Repeat this every week and report the species map after every pass. Come back to the barn and charge yourself whenever you get low."
It's not hard to put OpenClaw into a robot body (numerous YouTube videos showing people doing this sort of thing), but when you dig in and see what people have done, the actual movement portion is always the clunkiest part (and this matches my own experiments as-such as well). It feels like an 8B model like this would be perfect for solving pathing and navigation issues.
Anyone who may be more experienced with Mistral (or companies like them) -- are they interested in hobbyist builders who would be experimenting with things like this? Or are they primarily looking for commercial partners? I would be willing to pay a license fee to use the model in my experiments, but if I'm just one guy, I'm not sure they'd want to work with me unless I were building a business out of it (which I'm not).
Some of the coding-specific fine-tunes were really impressive boosts. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct is also available [0] -- if it's not too much to ask, I'd be curious how more general models stack up in your benchmark?
Setting up good book publishing pipelines with version control + CI/CD might sounds simple, but I don't think it's trivial.
One of the best examples of this that I've ever seen is The Sourdough Framework [0] -- really impressed with the way that versioning and publishing is integrated in that book.
And yes -- I know it sounds like yet another Javascript library -- but it's actually a book about sourdough bread making. It's been discussed here several times before, but this one from 2023 [1] may have been the most popular (103 comments)
If you're looking for a good test suite, I wonder if you might be able to adapt any of the tests available in XMage? They have a pretty extensive test suite (such as for copy effects [0]) and if you point your agent at their code, I wonder how many could be usefully adapted to your system?
I've been doing similar experiments lately (using ViT's) to do card recognition, and so far it's been working really well for me. If you want to compare notes, I've open-sourced my code / weights [0] and written some blogs about how mine works [1]. I'd love to see if we can collaborate!
> Push the inference to the client-side (WebGPU / Web Workers).
I have an example of this working in webgpu / wasm here [2] along with a playground environment (demonstrated here [3]). I'm currently training a new version that uses a different ViT backbone more optimized for WASM inference -- it's currently converging, and I hope to have it finish training (or at least reach parity with the previous model) in about a week (took ~200 epochs for my last one to reach the level that it's at, and it takes about an hour per epoch in my current setup).
You mentioned WebGPU -- I've run into issues with the MobileViT-XXS backbone producing bad results in WebGPU on Android, so YMMV in whether or not WebGPU is stable enough to use for this or not. I don't know if it's my problem or a true bug in the platform, but I've fallen back to WASM and things are working much better since then.
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
> it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth.
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
It's not just about web search though -- there's another element too. I go to Grok to find things I have failed to find with web search.
I agree with GP -- if I want sourced commentary on current events, Grok is my go-to above the other models. For whatever reason, its search feels better and more up-to-date -- whereas the others feel more like filters of media, Grok feels more like filters of sources.
Microsoft releases a new open-weight model that tops the MTEB leaderboard for the largest model (27b), but also includes smaller models that are top of their respect "weight" classes (hah!) -- 0.6b (embedding size 1024) and 270m (embedding size 640).
All have best-in-class context length, and the numbers look very impressive. Very excited to see this release!
https://github.com/HanClinto
hanclinto at gmail dot com