OpenClaw Nodes: Connecting Your AI Agent to Physical Devices

Your AI agent lives on a gateway. The gateway talks to Slack, Discord, or Telegram. But what if you want the agent to see through a camera, grab your phone's location, snap a screenshot, or run a shell command on a remote server? That's what nodes are for. A node is a companion device — iOS, Android, macOS, or any headless Linux machine — that connects to the OpenClaw Gateway over WebSocket and exposes a command surface. Once paired, your agent can invoke those commands as naturally as any other tool call. No polling loops, no bespoke APIs. Just pairing and using. What Is a Node? In OpenClaw's architecture, the gateway is the always-on brain — it receives messages, runs the model, routes tool calls. A node is a peripheral device that connects to that gateway via WebSocket with role: node . Nodes don't process messages or run models. They expose a command surface. When the agent calls a node command, the gateway forwards the request to the paired device, the device executes it, and the