Robel: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots | Hacker News Reader

Robel: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots

ai.googleblog.com

88 pointstheafh25 comments

They may be lower cost than the status quo, but $3199 to $3699 is out of my reach as a (non professional) hobbyist. I hope maybe one day though!

https://sites.google.com/view/roboicsbenchmarks/getting-star...

https://www.trossenrobotics.com/d-kitty.aspx

https://www.trossenrobotics.com/d-claw.aspx

Not quite in the realm like the $50 to $90 'Google Voice / Google Vision AI' kits

https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/

You’re not the intended audience. This is meant for small research labs that are just starting up and want to enter the RL/Robotics research space and can’t afford a $400,000 PR2 or $150,000 shadow hand.

Totally worth the money :)

https://youtu.be/c3Cq0sy4TBs

"The Proud Robot", Henry Kuttner, Astounding 1943

https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article863

You can buy a meca500 for 15k USD. If you are just doing learning stuff, it should be more than adequate.

How do you know these prices? I generally find these companies do not publish them on their websites

Hardly secret around institutions that have them.

The main cost is the actuators. The servos they use are the only ones out there with integrated feed back from the sensors which is required so they can calculate hardware safety. They also have, albeit pretty bad, torque control which is necessary for many approaches to controlling legged robots and manipulators.

According to a Chinese SCARA motor producer, Tamagawa is a notable Japanese manufacturer of servos used in SCARA robots. http://www.tamagawa-seiki.com/products/servomotor/

Wouldn’t stepper motor with encoder and current sensor be cheaper?

I'm skeptical that a stepper motor would be able to support it's own weight and more without a gearbox. This is especially important for making serial manipulators. Also keep in mind that what they're aiming for here is repeatability so that researchers can easily compare their algorithms. That means using parts that don't vary too much and minimizing the amount of assembly researchers have to do. There are much cheaper knock off versions of these actuators, although they may not be as repeatable. At the very least they aren't as well documented.

Steppers are highly repeatable.

This is more about repeatable experiments than particular movements.

Regarding the price, the actuators seem to be ~240USD. A good stepper motor with the appropriate feedback mechanism to make it suitable for servo-like control plus a modern stepper motor controller that is suited for the robotics context will likely not be (much) cheaper and you have to hack together the servo functionality, tune settings, etc. - which seems detrimental if the goal is repeatability accross teams. I'm not in the target audience for these robots either but from the perspective of robustness and repeatable research they don't look too shabby.

That wouldn't work for a robotic hand.

Maybe I am missing something but fundamentally you can "learn" in the ML sense with any sensor and effector.

Examples of cheap sensors: MEMS microphone, camera, voltage sensor, mass sensor, distance sensor, multi-axis position sensors (gyroscope/magnetometers).

Examples of effectors: Any kind of motor, solenoid, LEDs, etc.

If you want to constrain the question to 3D motion, here is a suggestion - hack the controller of any existing RC car platform. Add overhead position sensing within a fixed arena added via external camera. Maybe add a MEMS microphone (USD$3) or position sensor (~USD$10) to verify airtime/orientation. ML problem #1: Add a ramp. Try to get it to jump highest (longest time airborne). ML problem #2: Same with a power efficiency metric. ML problem #3: Same with a time efficiency metric applied to navigation from a random start point and orientation. ML problem #4: Motor noise vs. jump height optimization.

Byron Boot's lab at Georgia Tech does a lot of interesting work with larger-scale R/C vehicles. That being said, by adding more degrees of freedom you're making the configuration space of the robot higher. In many cases, higher dimension configuration spaces are more difficult for traditional sampling-based approaches. Learning approaches may be able to bias their solutions to avoid large sections of this configuration space.

I'm interested in hearing from anybody who has sucessfully built a useful research robot for < $1K. Even just a SCARA arm.

my experience has been everything < $1K uses crappy servos.

The servos are certainly where you can spend most money when building a robot for research. I tried building small research robots with small servos ($25 each), see results at the end of this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q8jgu-EtCFc

The total cost for one robot was well below 1k. The servos are $25 each (Turnigy 306G if remember correctly), all connecting parts are 3d printed, the electronics and batteries are about $50, and you could add a raspberry pi for $50. So in total <$500, depending on number of DOFs.

Of course, these servos don't have the same torque as Dynamixles, for example. But they are lighter!

Do you have any videos of the actual robots or just the simulation?

thanks, that's what I was looking for. Do you find the 306Gs work reliably and the cables don't get messed up in routine research work?

I am trying to build a suspended robot for about $1000 as an open source project:

http://fae-bot.org/

Unfortunately at that price it comes without a manipulator, but I have bought (very) cheap arms and will experiment with them soon.

our lab uses Dynamixles in the widow x (https://www.trossenrobotics.com/widowxrobotarm) and the servos alone are 70% of the total cost.

is anyone aware of an open-source alternative to these servos? this would be a great contribution to the community, if not available already

I have a hard time finding a good heavier duty servo that does not cost the price of a car. I looked into how to make one from a DC motor. There are some open source project about it:

https://hackaday.io/project/9433-brushed-dc-servo-drive

https://www.crowdsupply.com/citrus-cnc/tarocco

But for some reason, most projects I found do not use DC motors:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tropicallabs/mechaduino...

https://odriverobotics.com/

If you ever find a good OSS servo, could you ping me?

Curious that they wouldn’t include PPO in their related work, but DDPG. Did I miss something important that makes PPO inapplicable here?

You can translate this short article of mine https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-t... to get real, low-cost “toys” for a small mechatronics lab suited to almost any dl & rl starting level endeavor you want. (tldr: less than $1.5k would suffice in first instance)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com