Franka: A Robot Arm That’s Safe, Low Cost, and Can Replicate Itself
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
But if they can actually hit the price point it will be game changing:
"Another factor that will make Franka stand out is cost. At the time of this writing, the robot was available for preorder at a yet-to-be-confirmed price of €9,900, or about $10,500. That’s a startlingly low figure for such a capable robotic arm. For comparison, Rethink’s Sawyer sells for $29,000, and Universal Robots’ best-selling UR5 costs even more, at $35,000."
Heck, even $15K vs the standard $30K would be a big improvement.
One of these arms at £10k would put it at less than 10 weeks of 24 hour minimum wage pay (18-21 year olds).
Assuming they had a total cost of ownership at (say) £3k/year, and ran for 90% of the time then they'd cost roughly £0.38 per hour.
Ie, if there are big improvements left to be made then that network effect can be overcome a few times by each 'big leap' change. Once the market matures though, you probably will see strong lock-in as you describe.
Truth is, robots have been building robots since the 60s or so, long before I was born, and long before skynet was a fictional gleam in some author's eye.
Also, if it works the way they say it does, where it is constantly comparing what it measures against its internal model and adjusting the model (similar to how our own arms and brain works), again, precision (in the geometry of the parts) isn't so necessary.
Combine that with designing it in a way that it can do a large part of making new robot arms, and the costs should drop and the capabilities should increase....dramatically.
Else you enter the World of cameras and image processing. A expensive world still.
Cameras aren't particularly expensive, the ones made for cell phones can do fine and they are a couple bucks. The software is hard but machine learning is improving by leaps and bounds. And software may be expensive to develop, but it isn't expensive to make another copy of.
Robotics is really, really hard.
I mean, imagine the only really useful thing one of these things can do is make a copy of itself. And it might takes it a month running non-stop to do it, but the parts are cheap so it only costs a few hundred bucks for a new one. Would you want one of these things in your basement working away? I sure would. And I'd be pretty interested in tweaking its software and training data and whatnot to make it faster and better.
Sure it'll be a good while before it is folding laundry or picking weeds in the garden or whatever, but I think the pace of improvement would pick up quick once these things are available in mass.
Cause honestly, I would love to play and experiment with a few of these to see what I can automate around the house and maybe if I was inclined create a mini-assembly line for "etsy" like products.