One has to wonder why the hell they'd make a chess robot with a grip so strong that it takes the concerted effort of two adults to pry it loose.
And blaming it on the kid was real classy.
And blaming it on the kid was real classy.
The amount of pressure this robot applies is totally adequate for its normal operating environment which is far away from humans.
There might be a way to vary the level of force applied but it may have been abstracted away (maybe you need to go one level lower to get that level of control) by a simpler API for applications where a "default" level of pressure is acceptable.
As for the Chernobyl comment, if they had not dug under the elephant’s foot before it started to cut into the subsoil, that’s exactly what would have happened when it hit the water table. People risked a lot to keep that from happening.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robot-arm-deve...
I built the jig for firmware uploading and testing last year. Had to place the pcb on the jig manually and wait (~2 minutes) for the process to complete.
I’m building the robot cell this year which will do a batch of ~15 pcbs at a time.
I update often on Social Media! http://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc
MG400 is really affordable, Dobot also has a smaller educational/tinker version called the Magician (lots of other ones: uArm, mycobot/mypalletizer, mirobot, etc). A step above the MG400, price wise, would be an Epson Scara or a 6-dof Yaskawa MotoMini. Lots of Scara Robots in the 5-20k price range. 6-dof like UR3 or Motoman Mini are like 20-50k. Ebay has a bunch of used ones that are much cheaper too!
it's interesting to watch some of the Boston Robotics videos. They're mostly supposed to be entertaining, but even then, it's clear that they've thought about safety.
In one, they're dancing, but the dance area is surrounded by observation walls. In another one, a guy tests a robot's sense of balance and ability to react to unexpected events. He uses a broom stick to push the robot to try to unbalance it, and a hockey stick to knock a box away from the robot as it was about to pick it up.
In other words, you just don't go right up to the robot and do what you want, you maintain distance in case the robot does something unexpected. I presume they have some kind of kill switch, too, in case the whole experiment goes tits up.
That whole robot chess stunt seems pretty dumbass in retrospect, but instead of learning the lesson that industrial robots are potentially dangerous they go and blame the boy. So, lesson very much not learned in this instance.