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Comment by MahiShafiullah | Hacker News Reader

1. They have very detailed guides on the hardware here [0], which should tell you a lot of information you may need to know.

2. However, I think a large part of the price tag is really the cost of R&D, and once this gets out of prototype stage and goes into mass production price is bound to come down a lot. Compared to a lot of other robots, $20K is much cheaper. For example, compare Boston Dynamic's robot dog, Spot, which is around $200K iirc.

3. But that's also why we need more projects like Dobb-E on these robots! Without the right "apps" home robots will never catch on properly to get to the point of mass-production.

[0] https://docs.hello-robot.com/0.2/stretch-hardware-guides/doc...

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Do you think this could be adapted to smaller robot like this Pi-based XGO CM4[0]

I know they have different hardware but the end result is quite similar: a mobile robot with an articulated grabber. And seeing your prototype made me think of the robot dog.

[0] https://shop.elecfreaks.com/products/elecfreaks-cm4-xgo-robo...

Smaller robots are unfortunately limited in how much force/torque they can apply and how high they can reach, two factors that we found can severely limit the applicability of a home robot. As a result, unfortunately, we don't have much plans for extending to a smaller robot at this moment.

However, all of our designs are open source! So if you or someone else is interested, it could be a fun weekend project to design a "Stick" equivalent data collection tool for the XGO CM4. I would love to see how that turns out.

Compute on theirs is an Intel Nuc 8 (probably explains a decent part of the price). Appreciate the link to the more "hobbyist friendly" device you mentioned. I am thinking it might do well as a platform for light dusting around the house and other things to supplement a Robovac.

how does a 300-600$ PC explain a decent part of a 20000$ robot?

Not that it changes your point, but Spot is $75k.

There's a knockoff for $23k though, so hopefully this one for $20 makes competitors available for cheaper.

https://robostore.com/products/unitree-go1-edu-plus-3d-lidar

I'm sorry, should have been clearer. The Spot robot with a manipulator arm (which has been used in some home projects before, see [0]) I believe totals up to about $200K. The base robot is $75K, which is what you linked to. I mentioned that figure because that seemed more relevant.

[0] https://adaptiveskillcoordination.github.io/

this is really awesome. $20k is just too high for a toy, but I'm reading through this to see if there's a way to get this to $2k

I know everyone here mostly knows this, but in LCoL areas (South Africa for me specifically), that $20K almost buys you an entire house that you can live in in near-perpetuity. Not only that, but I could hire low-skilled labor for 7200 hours for the same cost. Just thought I'd add a bit of 3rd-world perspective to the discussion.

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