Stretch is a compact, mobile manipulator developed by Hello Robot with the explicit goal of making home and office robotics research affordable and scalable. At roughly the size of a small floor lamp, Stretch combines a lightweight telescoping arm on a differential-drive mobile base with a gripper and a mast-mounted Intel RealSense camera. Its retail price of approximately $25,000 makes it one of the most accessible full mobile-manipulation platforms for academic research, particularly for tasks in human-centric indoor environments. The hardware design emphasizes safety and simplicity for domestic settings. The arm is deliberately low-mass and low-power, making it safe to operate near people without heavy guarding. The mobile base is narrow enough to pass through standard doorways, and the telescoping arm provides a large vertical workspace from floor to countertop height. Onboard compute is provided by a Jetson Orin module, enabling local visual perception and neural-network inference. The robot runs ROS 2 natively, with all drivers, teleoperation interfaces, and calibration routines available as open-source packages. One of the primary use cases for Stretch is data-driven manipulation in real homes. Researchers use Stretch to collect large-scale datasets of daily household tasks—opening drawers, picking up objects, wiping surfaces—using a combination of teleoperation and kinesthetic demonstration. The resulting datasets feed into imitation learning and VLA pipelines. Several recent works (including contributions from the DROID dataset and open-source community) feature Stretch as one of the primary embodiment platforms because of its reproducibility and low barrier to deployment. The software ecosystem is another major strength. Hello Robot maintains well-documented Python APIs for low-level joint control, trajectory generation, and camera streaming. Integration with LeRobot, ACT, and diffusion policy frameworks is straightforward, and the community actively shares trained checkpoints and task-specific dataset collection scripts. For robotics labs aiming to study long-horizon mobile manipulation in unstructured environments, Stretch offers a pragmatic combination of hardware, cost, and software support that is difficult to match with custom-built platforms.