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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

The robot is a standard industrial robot arm that happens to be used for chess - it it was not made to be a chess robot. This is absolutely overkill for chess even just from a cost perspective so you wouldn't build something like this if you actually were building a chess robot.

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.

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"The amount of pressure this robot applies is totally adequate for its normal operating environment which is far away from humans."

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.

I have a robot arm (Dobot MG400), it has a has a force sensitivity setting (5 levels) that stops when a collision happens. There's also an e-stop that you can hit that will stop the robot.

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for? I'd love to play around with one but I can't think of many use-cases beyond showing it off to guests.

“Y’all want to see my robot arm?” seems like a great way to kick off a conversation!

If I had a robotic arm at home, I'd use it for making cocktails.

I really hope the answer is "robot chess"

It’s to move pcbs for firmware uploading and testing.

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!

Which leads to the next question: WHY is such a dangerous robot being used to play chess against people?

Most likely because they got it for cheap/free and someone had some fun programming it without ever thinking about the dangers - presumably they never actually observed just how much force this thing could produce.

From the article: "We rented the robot, it used to be with experts in many places for a long time. Apparently the operators overlooked that."

“It was cheaper” is how Chernobyl nearly permanently destroyed the water supply of all of eastern and parts of Central Europe.

Every part of that reply is wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210234

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.

Human-safe “collaborative robot” types are like iMac with VESA mounts, they’re niche product not readily and cheaply available.

Oh come on, we do this since we could do it:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robot-arm-deve...

Beyond pressure settings, you can also design the robot to just be 'soft' in the first place: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics

I am Baymax. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?

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