I'm surprised (or perhaps very unaware) that there doesn't seem to exist a company yet that mass produces cheap, high quality, reasonably standardized robot arms. So many things like 3D printers or CNC machines have entered the consumer/amateur level price realm, but this seems to be something still largely unexplored. Seems to have Arduino/Raspberry Pi scale potential, but I haven't heard of a name/ecosystem that po…
I worked for a startup developing robot arms for a while. What we found was that giving someone a robot arm - even one with reasonable APIs and no cost to them - didn't really help because the hard part is making useful automations. Mostly people spent a few hours playing with the arm and then put it on a shelf. Every use case is completely different and is a lot of work. Even when you get something working, accident…
Low Cost Robot Arm
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Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#162I'm surprised (or perhaps very unaware) that there doesn't seem to exist a company yet that mass produces cheap, high quality, reasonably standardized robot arms. So many things like 3D printers or CNC machines have entered the consumer/amateur level price realm, but this seems to be something still largely unexplored. Seems to have Arduino/Raspberry Pi scale potential, but I haven't heard of a name/ecosystem that po…
- Arm wrestling a toddler? - Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand? - Drink mixer? - Handing towel when in the bathroom, then getting a new one? - Setting up my morning espresso? (grinding the beans and turning on the coffee machine) Which of those can/cannot be done and why?
Like arm wrestling a brick wall; if you can push it over then you win, if you can't push it over then you lose - either way there's not much fun in it. And if it can beat the toddler it risks injuring them because neither of them really understand what's happening and what the risks are. The arm can't stop if the toddler says 'ow'.
> "Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand?"
Can be done already with a commercial 2D plotter: https://www.axidraw.com/ . It costs twice as much as this arm, but you don't have to build it and it already has "software for realistic handwriting" and there's a company to get support from.
> "Handing towel when in the bathroom, then getting a new one?"
Is the arm big enough to be useful for that? It appears to be shorter than a typical human arm so it would be cheaper, simpler and quicker to put the pile of clean towels a foot closer to the shower where the robt arm is sitting, and not have the robot arm at all. Plus you wouldn't have to deal with electricity in the bathroom or dripping water on the robotics as you reached for the towel it was handing you. (Are you thinking of a robot arm with cameras for feedback of where it's positioned? Cameras in a bathroom won't be popular with everyone no matter how much you promise they are innocent).
> "Setting up my morning espresso? (grinding the beans and turning on the coffee machine)"
Simpler and cheaper done with a timer mains plug which you can get for under $10. Put the beans in and load up the coffee machine the night before (work you'd have to do anyway) and have the timer start them in the morning. If you expect the robot arm to unseal a bag of coffee beans, measure some out, deposit them in the grinder, close the grinder, and close and seal the bag after, you'll wake up to spilled beans and unsealed bag a lot of days before you get that working reliably. Instead of $250 plus weeks of effort to speed up this 2 minute task(!) you can get a Keurig / Nespresso pod coffee maker for less than $100.
> "Drink mixer?"
How much spilled wasted alcohol, plus time of disassembling and cleaning your robot arm and the surface it sits on, and the floor, or finding the bottles, unscrewing the tops, handing them to the arm, waiting for the arm to slowly pour them which you could have done quicker, then putting the tops back on and putting the bottles away yourself, then putting the drink stirrer into the arm, then waiting for it to mix the drinks which you could have done yourself quicker, before you decide this was not a good use of time or money? (How often do you drink mixed drinks anyway?)
The robot isn't going to learn to do the task better next time like a human could so if you have to get involved in the task at all, you may as well do it yourself. And if it's a 15 second task like "reaching for a towel" what are you doing with your life trying to automate that? Roomba saves a lot of time, a lot of annoyance, it could be worth it even if it does an inferior job - because you can leave it running over and over and over. Same with a robot lawnmower, if you just glance around to make sure there's no pets or children in the way then let it go, it can save you a good chunk of time and if it goes wrong you just get a patchy lawn or dusty floor and it can retry tomorrow. But handing you a towel or mixing you a drink saves you almost no time, but if it goes wrong you get a broken bottle of sticky drink all over or a pile of towels on the floor, which has undone months of 'time saved' in one go.
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#163I started working on a similarly sized arm. I've got a use-case, long time friends with a glass blower. I was thinking of using it to make faceted glass pendants. They've got a faceting machine but it is manually operated. The hard part is repeatability. You need tight tolerances and each joint in the arm adds inaccuracy the further you get from the base. If the base has 1mm of wiggle, the 20cm arm has 4mm wiggle at…
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, that model is expensive and buggy, not to mention closed source.
Depends where you live... In some places those models are entirely affordable. But likely will also there get less and less affordable.
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Arm wrestling a toddler? - Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand? - Drink mixer? - Handing towel when in the bathroom, then getting a new one? - Setting up my morning espresso? (grinding the beans and turning on the coffee machine) Which of those can/cannot be done and why?
> " Arm wrestling a toddler " Like arm wrestling a brick wall; if you can push it over then you win, if you can't push it over then you lose - either way there's not much fun in it. And if it can beat the toddler it risks injuring them because neither of them really understand what's happening and what the risks are. The arm can't stop if the toddler says 'ow'. > " Handwriting notes for small jewelry brand? " Can be…
AND very likely to be completely outdated within a few generations (5 years?) of robotics + AI progress.
I would also not discount how easy it is to sell people on additional cameras in their homes (including the bathroom) for the sake of convenience.
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uneducated in hardware, mostly a software guy for perspective, so I could be way off. Would using something like a stepper motor geared way down with a cycloidal gear box work for a situation like this? (in my mind) It would give you a very controllable and repeatable way to position, with the backlash handled by the gearbox mainly. Would love to know if I'm wrong though, like I said mostly a software guy trying to v…
Servo + Cycloidal or Harmonic gears are usually the way to go, but to get them backlash-free is hard (or expensive, if you're buying). Once you got that down challenges include: * How rigid are the links between my joints? Plastic will wobble, metal is better * How heavy is my arm and how does that limit its movement? If you go for stiff metal castings, you add weight you need to move. The lever arm relative to the b…
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#167Any idea how much weight this could hold? I’m wanting to manipulate a fan in my home gym with some eye tracking to get it to blow air on my face when I work out, but the fan is a few pounds. Alternatively: any hardware motor suggestions for such a project?
Most of these robots will use servo motors - that gives you dexterity but means that holding any position requires constant holding torque - which means limited payload and a lot of wasted power. For a heavy fan (don't forget the reaction force from moving air too), you'd be better off mounting it on a some sort of bearing and just using a motor to turn it. That way the motor isn't trying to fight gravity all the tim…
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#168I'm surprised (or perhaps very unaware) that there doesn't seem to exist a company yet that mass produces cheap, high quality, reasonably standardized robot arms. So many things like 3D printers or CNC machines have entered the consumer/amateur level price realm, but this seems to be something still largely unexplored. Seems to have Arduino/Raspberry Pi scale potential, but I haven't heard of a name/ecosystem that po…
I worked for a startup developing robot arms for a while. What we found was that giving someone a robot arm - even one with reasonable APIs and no cost to them - didn't really help because the hard part is making useful automations. Mostly people spent a few hours playing with the arm and then put it on a shelf. Every use case is completely different and is a lot of work. Even when you get something working, accident…
Do you know if anyone has tried building an arm that uses spatial positioning techniques from augmented reality, like structured light or pose tracking[1], to understand the position of the arm in space without resorting to "dead reckoning"?
It seems like that kind of approach would increase the physical tolerance and reduce the programming complexity, since you know both a) where the arm is supposed to be, and b) where it actually is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pose_tracking#Outside-in_track...
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#169The geek in me is drooling, but are there any practical home uses others have found for robotic arms? Hacking is always more fun with a good project
Holding a water pistol to shoot at foxes in my garden might be useful. They other humane deterrents (ultrasonics etc) don't work.
Re: Low Cost Robot Arm
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems trivial Said like someone who's never tried it :) For a start you're going to need a camera. Maybe more than one. You want depth sensing? Even an cheap choice like a RealSense is going to add another $250 to your costs. And you'll need a sturdy mount for it, the robot's going to vibrate the table and you don't want to suffer motion blur. Got the camera in a fixed location, over the area you're picking from? T…
It’s trivial to fork one of the several open source projects focused on this problem.