171–180 of 258 posts
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 want the arm to wander around my house, pick up articles of loose clothing and put them into washing machine. Then pull them out and spread them on a drying hanger. How far away from that are we?
In the US or Western Europe, a human worker would cost you about $12-$15 per hour (depending on the actual city and whether they're paying their taxes).
You're looking at roughly 4 hours of work per 100 square meters (the average housing size[1]) per week to get the listed activities done, plus some general cleaning.
So let's call it $60 per week or $3,000 per year. If we estimate the average useful lifetime of such a robot at 5 years, they'd need to cost less than $15k (unadjusted for inflation) to make sense.
This does not take into account that the house owner also would be paying for a small portion of the societal cost of this additional unemployed houseworker. If we assume that there are roughly 1 maid per 500 citizens[2] and that each unemployed worker costs roughly $20,000 to the State per year[3] then our back-of-the-napkin math says the robot worker is generating a socialized cost of $400 per year per household member (2.17 members on average).
So... we need a ~$14,132 fully-automatic, solar-charging bot before your dream can break even.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073340/ [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1087472/number-maids-hou... [3]: https://blogs.alternatives-economiques.fr/gadrey/2016/06/19/...
Any 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?
Why not start with something less ambitious, like low cost robot platform able to follow people and carry stuff around and avoid obstacles. No arms, I am okay using mine to put stuff on and off it. When I had leg injury and used crutches, carrying stuff around suddenly became a problem. There are many people with impaired movement. And even without that, I often misplace things and it could help there. There are plen…
“Follow me” luggage exists https://www.aristavault.com/products/follow-me-smart-luggage
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> low cost robot platform able to follow people and carry stuff around and avoid obstacles. So, basically autonomous self-driving mini vehicle. Сompanies spend billions on self-driving cars with quite limited luck.
> Сompanies spend billions on self-driving cars with quite limited luck. That's in part because it needs to be very reliable to not kill people. If the worst that can happen is killing a garden gnome or running over someone's toes you can tolerate more error.
Impractical, but here are my kitchen use-cases: - Hold a hot pan and drip bacon grease into a jar - Hold "almost empty" bottles like olive oil upside down to drain them - Making dishes that require constant stirring over a long period (tapioca, risotto, etc)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d use it to pick through and sort the massive pile of Lego my children leave behind after an Easter long weekend. Seems trivial to do identification based on the high quality corpus of block databases. Wouldn’t have to be super quick - you could just leave it running overnight. I’m sure someone’s written an interesting paper on the ideal sorting algorithm too (i.e. large things > small things vs. ‘just pick up and…
My impression is that the fastest/easiest way to do it would be putting all the pieces inside hopper with the selector at the bottom. Perhaps using compressed air to push the falling pieces into different containers as they fall. I believe there’s already something like that in produce factories, separating vegetables by state/size.
Apparently pretty much every grain of rice you've eaten has been through a machine like that.
Impractical, but here are my kitchen use-cases: - Hold a hot pan and drip bacon grease into a jar - Hold "almost empty" bottles like olive oil upside down to drain them - Making dishes that require constant stirring over a long period (tapioca, risotto, etc)
Hah! Not actually a robot... but I half suspect I could convince the that wife a fold-out arm with a modest clamp (that could rotate a bit if needed) at the end would be worth mounting to a wall along the kitchen counters for holding/draining various containers like your first two use-cases.
I 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…
Here's some specifics if you're interested. Depending on the end effector payload requirements, a mix of NEMA34,24,17 can do this (bigger ones for earlier joints). You can go cycloidal/harmonic gears if you have the budget, otherwise each actuator (motor + driver + gearbox + shaft coupling) would run you something like $100-$200 depending heavily on supplier and exact requirements (+$50 or so for closed-loop systems). So not terrible on the price front. Then for the base joint you'd want some wider cylindrical gearbox that distributes the load across better.
If you're able to work with a machine shop I think you can put together something really high quality. Here's some example design inspirations, some of them even better than what I described I was able to put together as a hobbyist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z6rZdYHYfc (this one is fantastic; a smaller and lighter version operated more slowly would have even less wiggle from the base) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/II8gdIXPgaE (this is more comparable to the OP) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_x7P9eZCkVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9AfhqOd-_I (most professional one I've seen, and almost certainly this BOM would be under $3k, probably under $1k in China. In fact I'll go ahead and email these guys since this is so cool and I wonder if they sell smaller models) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB2NAgfVjIs (definitely check out Chris Annin, American roboticist who imo makes some of the best open source low cost stepper motor robots)