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Open Problems in Robotics

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Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but the real issue in robotics is two-fold and he mention both. 1. The cost & technical limitation. The cost, as some of the solution per problem OP suggest include "Lidar, visions and sensor" and all of those thing cost a lot by themselves. On top of that you need good actuators (Harmonic drives etc) for precision, and then good computing unit to handle all of it. Now you also need more power supply,…

The points you make are all true until they are not. Many useful robots should be able to work well enough for the purpose at a reasonable cost. Part of that is mass production brings prices down. The problem is of course until we can solve the problem of making it work at all price isn't a consideration. You can go bankrupt advancing the state of the art which then is enough for someone else to take your work and (r…

Servos are mass produced but still expensive!

You're right, but also software is weird. The world is absolutely littered with good computers that other people have already paid for, just waiting to be put to use for your project to expand their capabilities. If every new web app required its own little pocket computer to run, that you had to convince your customers to buy and keep in their home, it would be much less profitable to develop web apps.

The world is not littered with idle, high-performance robots waiting around for your motion planning algorithm to kick them into action. That makes it a lot more expensive and a lot less profitable.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#232
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The real problem: solve any of these problems, make very little money" - Just curious why have you come to this conclusion ? Object manipulation has potential products in dishwashing and vegetable chopping - sufficiently large markets, potential billion $ outcomes for a startup which takes the early mover lead. Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do. Extremely difficult to solve, but…

Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do. Rethink Robotics, a Rod Brooks startup, tried that, with "Baxter". Company went bust. There's good, simple commercial hardware for high-volume vegetable chopping and dishwashing, and it can be found in most large commercial kitchens. There's a huge amount of special purpose machinery in the world. Most of it is pretty dumb. Newer machinery tends…

They also had this obsession with low-bandwidth series elastic actuators, which make robots safer but slow and unproductive.

ABB's YuMi is perhaps a better example.

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