Catching skin cancer early is a home robotics problem. Melanoma is highly treatable when detected early, yet today’s screening process depends heavily on patients noticing tiny changes across their entire skin surface. This requires patients to solve a near-impossible visual-memory and registration problem. I built OpenDerm, an open-source 4-DOF robot that captures high-resolution images of the skin and uses them to reconstruct and track the skin surface in 3D over time. The best way to make skin screening truly routine is to bring it into the home. OpenDerm shows that inexpensive robotic skin imaging is possible, but the path to scale is not a dedicated screening robot in every household—it is to make skin screening one of the many useful things a general-purpose home robot can do. Read more about why I built OpenDerm and how it works here: Blog: Project: