Define low-cost? What sensors are being used in the video?
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-...
[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."
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.