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Comment by suyash | Hacker News Reader

Robotics needs to become affordable for indie developers be able to hack them almost like Raspberry Pi projects.

Have you checked out the Le Robot project by Huggingface? You can build two robot arms SO-ARM100 (leader+follower) for less than 250€ or so.

And you can train the model by yourself without relying on cloud services.

Some URLs to get your started:

https://huggingface.co/lerobot

https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/examples/10...

the latest project: Le Kiwi, using the SO-ARM100 arm:

https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/examples/11...

the super advanced HopeJR shoulder + arm + hands:

https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/HOPEJr

cool video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHfy2vACyw

it's about to reach that point soon actually. There is no reason these models can't be optimized/distilled. And actuators be cheaper (it's happening already).

Problem is that any sort of non-trivial robotics is easily weaponisable

I don't think this argument really matters. Consumer drones are being used in active warfare today, as we speak, with minimal modifications. The cat is out of the bag no matter which way you look at it. You could just as well say that many chemicals at the construction store are easily weaponizable, they make for an explosive and there's plenty of guides online on how to do so.

Even with access to explosives, you still need a bit of gusto to carry out the rest of the crime. I think it's a bit different when you can ask the weapon to find and eliminate its target without you ever having to leave your garage.

Not being a high profile target myself, I'd rather take that risk and see where it goes. Unfortunately it's the high profile targets themselves that make the decisions, so after the first few incidents I figure there will be this whole mess where they try to clamp down on access to such things without sufficient forethought.

I see your point about safety, but I think that needs to be be in the AI model than on the hardware side.

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