Berkeley Blue – Accelerating robotics through low-cost hardware
berkeleyopenarms.org
berkeleyopenarms.org
For anyone interested here is a link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03815 . Having robotic arms for <$5k would be great for research, hobbyist and applications not requiring crazy accuracy. I don't have hard data at hand but I doubt that at present you can find commercially available robot with similar characteristics for less than $15k.
Another thing that's happening here and I really enjoy is how BLDC motors are being used in applications like these. The reason I like it so much is because hopefully there will be a market for cheap actuators that will do the job well enough to be used for some applications. I'm pretty sure that among other things I've seen a lot of BLDC based actuators on quadruped robots.
There are many Dynamixel based robots. It's basically an R/C servo with an encoder and a useful communications protocol. It's a fast motor with a lot of gear reduction, not very back-driveable, certainly not enough for force feedback. Typical pricing is in the $1000-$2000 range. The tier below that is robot arms with regular PWM R/C servos. I have a UArm like that on my desk. Repeatability is about 5mm. Costs a few hundred dollars. Not back-driveable at all.
Servomotors and motor controllers used to be incredibly expensive for what they do. Over $1000 for a motor controller was not unusual. The actuation end of robotics is getting cheaper, at last.
Yes. Those things used to be way overpriced. I was at an industrial trade show some years ago, and saw that Maxon, a motor manufacturer, had added controllers to their product line. I was chatting with the sales rep, and he said they'd added them because they were tired of selling $100 motors that were used with $1000 controllers, when motor and controller cost about the same to make. Selling both together resulted in a huge improvement in profit margin.
Encoders, too. For a long time, shaft encoders, which are very simple devices, were way overpriced. They were separate from motors, which meant you usually needed a motor with a shaft out each end, plus the parts to attach motor and shaft, plus the alignment problems of keeping two things with separate bearings concentric. With the encoder built into the motor, this all gets much simpler and neater.
It would be super cool to get the prices of the control boards down, standardize the software stacks that run these things, and really integrate them into everyday life. For now, I suppose we have to watch a group of people reinvent the ARM every few months.
[1]http://www.eezyrobots.it/eba_mk2.html [2] https://www.bcn3dtechnologies.com/en/bcn3d-moveo-the-future-...
Robot arms are pretty complicated electromechanical devices with high torque requirements. I suspect one day the manufacture of them will follow a similar path to cars, but until then building them cheaply will be hard. The volumes just aren't high enough yet.
Some advertise using imported SMC (Japanese) pneumatic/hydraulic mechanisms.
This may not be unrelated to the fact that you can buy a fully detailed product model like https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?526498275889 or https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=571064427455 for USD$0.30+.
IMHO the whole 'cobot' media fad and deployments with humans are needlessly complex versus just handing over between dedicated human-only and robot-only motion envelopes.
In industrial or small-scale automation settings, useful for a subset of tasks at best. For these special cobot cases, why not use a retrofit kit for third party arms? It makes more sense as would be more loosely coupled with inevitable hardware evolution and provenance.
Hell, it'd even work with arbitrary industrial gear. Talk about a large retrofit market.
Software people: that's a valid (and high fad-factor!) startup idea. Get some VC and go get 'em.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241632269_A_brief_s...
"During a 7 unit fabrication run in-house, Bill of Materials (BoM) cost for each arm was tracked at $3328 as shown in Table II. Plastics were printed on Markforged Onyx One and Monoprice MP Select Mini 3D printers. About 75% of our prototype costs were motors and driver boards."
That said, they seem to aim primarily at labs, not factory floors.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/05/08/this-25000-robot-wants-t...
"During a 7 unit fabrication run in-house, Bill of Materials (BoM) cost for each arm was tracked at $3328 as shown in Table II. Plastics were printed on Markforged Onyx One and Monoprice MP Select Mini 3D printers. About 75% of our prototype costs were motors and driver boards."
My belief about robotics is that we need really efficient and powerful artificial muscles and closer biomimicry. It seems like the way real limbs operate with leverage will be an advantage if we can get useful muscles.
How long will it take until reinforcement learning / ML can do these things automatically?