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I've found the real cost factor is not so much the robotics platforms when you want to make big+specialized things like this (because the robotics platforms specifically designed for one's particular problem space are often few or non-existent) but the hurdle of tool acquisition. That is to say, most people I know working on these sorts of things as hobbies build as much as they buy. A decent small metal lathe runs about $600-1000, a mill drill can be put together for around $1k, CNC router capable of cutting decent size panels of aluminum for around $2k+.

You can buy inexpensive robot platforms, but they're small - there's a reason for this. Heavy, powerful components cost real money and someone has to make margin selling them to you, given they paid margin to buy them. High power and high current control systems (motor drivers, motors, etc.) are more difficult and expensive to design than small, low-power units.

But, there's nothing stopping you from seeing a design you like, and making it from the raw parts, except a lack of tools (in most cases).

> a simple little robot platform moving around my house sensing tape on the floor. Even that will cost me $1000

Huh? You can buy line-following robot kits on Amazon for $30, and there are even cheaper ones out there.

> When can I build a robot that will perform real, useful automation that will improve my life, even in some marginal way, not just seem like a cool toy? How can I build a robot that will fetch me a beer or let the dog out or get the mail or something even minor that will make me feel like I am doing something with purpose and a real goal and not a homework assignment to get a robot to perform some meaningless task.

Right now, buy some motors, buy some metal stock, bearings, shaft, pulleys, etc. and start designing a machine around them. Long before you get to the algorithms of running a robot, there are the physics of it, the basic electronics knowledge, and the design and machining.

> What are some robotics projects that I can build and learn from while and actually use and enjoy, today, relatively cheaply?

Small robotic arms are cheap these days - OWI and Lynxmotion make fairly inexpensive arms for learning, small wheeled bases like the Dagu Wild Thumper can carry a small arm for around $250, and are well regarded. You can throw an Arduino or Raspberry Pi in for control put together a Lynxmotion arm and a Dagu base, and for less than $600, you have a platform that can lift small objects and move them around. When you want bigger, make it yourself from what you've learned.

> I've found the real cost factor is not so much the robotics platforms [..] but the hurdle of tool acquisition

That's what membership in your local fablab is for.

Indeed, or your local hackerspace, etc. In fact, the poster I commented to would probably find people there already working on the sorts of platforms (s)he envisions.

Yeah, we're more at the Homebrew Computer Club stage of soldering our own machines than the <platform> BASIC and BBS stage right now.

Give it 5 years though and I can see home kit manipulator, teachable robot kits that you could program to maybe water the plants or dry some dishes.

> Right now, buy some motors, buy some metal stock, bearings, shaft, pulleys, etc. and start designing a machine around them. Long before you get to the algorithms of running a robot, there are the physics of it, the basic electronics knowledge, and the design and machining.

This is very much a need. The Turtlebot is a low-cost ($1300) way to get a lot of functionality out of the box, though the lack of manipulator does limit what you can accomplish.

If you (or your lab/company) does have a five-figure budget for hardware, there are a number of very attractive off-the-shelf options which exist to prototype on: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/#Portals

(Disclosure: I work for Clearpath Robotics, which design and manufacture several of the machines on that page.)

>Huh? You can buy line-following robot kits on Amazon for $30, and there are even cheaper ones out there.

There is the hexbug spider which makes a nice, hackable beginner platform (http://www.amazon.com/HEXBUG-Hexbug-Spider-colors-vary/dp/B0...) with the addition of an arduino nano.

The kilobots are also cool (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html), and an even smaller, cheaper robot (http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/09/08/infrared-remote-contro...) using the same principle of locomotion.

ROS and Gazebo are Open Source, are used by professional researchers, and are all you need to make a real contribution. You can't afford a robot, but you can simulate a very good one for free.

http://www.osrfoundation.org/

The point I was trying to make was that this is great, but at the end of the day my final asset is a little simulator running on my computer that is basically only interesting to other robotics geeks and doesn't actually "do" anything. Some my earliest projects as a programmer were things like photo organization tools, online forum software, ANSI art editors, things that solved a tangible problem and that I could share and others could use. This aspect to it was key in keeping me motivated since it wasn't really a "homework assignment" that solved some abstract problem. I feel like there's a gap here.

I assumed the final asset would be your education.

But there is a real gap here: You probably don't have any problems that a simple robot would fix. You can buy a Roomba if you want. The killer app for robots is the autonomous car, and that is coming. No one has figured out what you want a robot for in that huge gap. Heartland has a nifty $20K robot that will do light handling tasks. You still don't want one.

If you can think of a robot version of the little software projects, good on you.

it is however a really good question - not just good on him, but inspiring to us all.

Is the autonomous car really the robotics killer app? I don't doubt that the autonomous car will reshape more than one industry (real estate, insurance, and transportation spring to mind), but I think proper robots might allow us to shed so many assumptions about what is possible that it's actually currently difficult to imagine all the things they will end up being used for.

It will save around 20,000 lives every year in the US alone. And prevent many more serious long-term injuries. What other household robot will have such an impact on families?

Don't get me wrong, self-driving cars are the human advancement that I am most looking forward to.

I think they will both be extremely big changes in different ways. Autonomous cars will be one big impact that indirectly touches many industries. Robots are going to get into everything, and the world will look very different at the end of it.

Robots will do farming, cleaning, food preparation, fire rescues, surgery, manufacturing. Basically, whatever parts of the world software can't eat, robots probably can.

I think a plain old "getter" would be fun. I'm on a chair and I want something to get that thing on the out of reach coffee table and bring it to me. Like a roomba with a camera and an arm.

(late edit: not Heartland: Rethink Robotics. They renamed before Baxter launched.)

I can think of a few projects that would be useful and fun, i.e. laundry-sorting bot, sandwich-making-bot etc., but they'd all be expensive and difficult to do.

A cheap, robust robot hand/arm would go a long way towards making this kind of robot-hacking accessible, but the bigger obstacle is that the generic computer vision building blocks that you'd need don't really exist yet (OpenCV is a good start)

The problem is that many tasks that seem simple (when you take millions of years of visual system evolution for granted), for example recognizing a sock in a pile of laundry, turn out to be pretty difficult.

Some of the theoretical problems do seem to be quite difficult, but the great thing about implementation is that as long as it works "well enough," no one minds if you cheat. For example, recognizing a sock in a pile is difficult, but what if the robotic arm just tries to pick it up anyway? From there it can weigh it as well as better seeing the size & shape of it in order to determine whether it is a sock. The difficult theoretical problem suddenly gets replaced with acceptable behaviour for the laundry-sorting application.

I like your outlook :)

On top of this, if a robot is doing the work it doesn't have to be the most efficient. Do it in stages... sort by weight or rough shape. Then a second pass does the "is this a shirt or pants" computation. Then sort those piles. Finally come back to "pairing socks". Or don't. It's already saved me a bunch of effort! Let someone else figure out what to do with a pre-sorted pile and I'll just add the firmware or another stage robot. It feels very "hacker ethic" to me!

You might be surprised at the software components which do actually exist:

http://moveit.ros.org/

Check out the videos on that page. There are a lot of obstacles to inexpensive robotic manipulation; the main ones are power-weight ratio and power-cost ratio of the actuators.

I think your statement can be turned into its own solution...

I agree that there is a real gap there - so a great contribution would be to fix the gap!

Compare hardware hacking. Until the last few years, it was pretty darned hard to get into. There have always been kits - e.g. the basic stamp, but they felt toyish. Lately though through a combination of Arduino, the explosion of hackerspaces, globalization allowing cheap and easy board design, and murky social forces entering the DIY electronics world has become a real thing. Gaps are being filled in at an impressive rate now... People are using Arduino to fix stuff that would have been a major project 10 years ago! Yes Arduino still has a tendency to feel like a toy (but less of one than a basic stamp), and, there are lots of projects that fill the space between it and DIY pocket computer... look at RaspberryPI or Beagle for examples - you can do a really good control system with them, python and minimal hardware knowledge.

So I suggest to you or anyone who wants to fill the gap - try to invent the Arduino of robotics kits. On your side there are several nice factors: easy access to 3d printing, widespread knowledge of the electronics parts listed above. Halfway decent free modeling packages (although engineering and simulation software may need some love). The opportunity is ripe!

I highly recommend watching a talk given by Erik Nieves from Motoman at the most recent RosCon because he talks about the state of the robotics industry and why this "gap" exists in a very accessible way.

http://vimeo.com/67044628

Two reasons why I think the gap between getting started and being able to build something useful exists is that robot parts are still much more expensive than we expect them to be and the fundamentals of robot movement are much more difficult to learn than we expect them to be. Unfortunately, I think those two factors discourage a lot of engineers early on and is why the size of this community is so small.

I feel very fortunate that I have a Kuka YouBot to hack on. The company I'm trying to get started with two friends wrote a proposal that got accepted into the sponsored track of a competition Kuka is running. (http://www.kuka-labs.com/en/network/innovationaward/) After setting it up, it's clear why this is a 20,000€ robot. But before you can actually DO anything useful with it, you have to be able to understand kinematics and dynamics as well as how to get path planners to talk to controllers. And then the really powerful stuff becomes possible once you incorporate computer vision, which is also not an easy topic to understand. It not surprising that most of this work is being done at universities by grad students.

The state of ROS today feels a lot like what Linux felt like to me back in the late 90's. There are lots of issues with dependencies and programs not compiling correctly. Documentation is severely lacking. But there's lots of enthusiasm from very friendly people to help each other work to make things better.

What makes me worry is that many of the advances in ROS came from Willow Garage and Google is buying up many of the companies that spun out of Willow whereas a lot was made possible in computer vision due to the sensors made by PrimeSense, which was just acquired by Apple. I hope the Google vs Apple rivalry doesn't slow the pace of progress in open source robotics that was making the dawn of non-industrial robotics seem not so far away.

Isn't this a role that 3d printing and Quadcopters are filling for like-minded tinkerers?

Extension projects : for instance, if one has a quadcopter and a go-pro, then the next problem is figuring out a cheaper gimbal mount (using BLDCs and a micro-controller/gyroscope).

I think that there are a lot of professional-quality robotics projects that one can do, if you look at specialties that use robots. "Robot" is a loaded term that conjures up generalized images of the stuff you read and see in movies. Look into keywords like "automation", "mechatronics", etc... Examples: Silicon wafer handlers, pick-and-place machines, vacuum cleaners, beer pourers, recycling sorters, package handlers, CNC machines, etc... An especially interesting field is open-source prosthetics.

There are prosumers making these types of robotics projects in their garages/local hackerspaces. There are many online forums where people sharing their builds as well, and many times these builds are actually used in production situations.

Also a high-quality robotics platform in no way needs to cost $1000. If you're on a budget just go to a local hobby shop, spend $100 on a chassis + wheels + motors and order some $0.10 sensors online.

All of your points are good but, keep in mind, a robot that is capable of changing your physical world for the better is capable of doing the opposite. A robot that can get you a beer can also drop one on your toe.

For this reason, I expect the "personal robot revolution" to occur at the nexus of wealthy/non-litigious. I'm not quite sure where that is maximized on earth at the moment, but I'm quite certain its not the USA. (My current bet is Chinese cities)

I've been wondering about this for a while given I currently work for a community college. Skipping the "robot engineer" degree I would expect to show up, what the heck kind of training would be needed for a "robot technician and repair" vocational program?

In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 seems a little excessive.

i am referring to a 'legit' robot platform that has sufficient sensors, wheel tick counting, etc, to implement full-on SLAM to get around an area of your house or something (built up from raw sensor and control I/O), which I'm assuming is kind of the "write a decent ray tracer" or "write a lisp" of the robotics world.

turtlebot is like $2k, for example:

http://store.clearpathrobotics.com/

The time is coming. Remember when computers were very expensive and out of reach for the average joe? It seems likely robotics will follow the same trajectory.

The next generation will probably be playing around with $50-100 robotic toys analogous to today's Raspberry Pi.

It's coming but robotics has a major obstacle: transferring power to locomotion. Ideally, we'd have something like a synthetic muscle that converts electricity to work. Instead we have all sorts of servo/hydraulics based actuators. Because of this robotics have a problem with elegant design (anything that doesn't run on wheels) and power/autonomy.

There are advances out there, but as long as one can't buy a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars it's not going to progress that much.

Tendons on linear motors seems like a good approach. http://www.roboy.org/

Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster.

What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.

Thanks, wasn't aware of roboy.

You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...

You might look at the Neato robotic vacuums. Unlike Roomba's random wandering, the Neato bots have 360-degree LIDAR on top and a wall-finder on the side to do SLAM. They also have a USB port on the side that supposedly provides raw data from the sensors as well as direct motor control. They get a good 1-1.5 hours of run-time per charge with the vacuum turned on, probably longer with it turned off. All that robot for under $200 if you watch for sales.

Indeed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/7123623579/ is generated from that scanner (on a clean floor, you do surprisingly well with just assuming the bot moved where you commanded it, as far as doing naive mapping with one.) At the time I got a little bogged down in running it tethered, today I'd just slap a raspi and a USB battery pack on top...

yeah proper robots is absurdly expensive. But its also multi-faceted. So if your interest is in machine vision, you can do alot of experiments with a web cam (which are really good now!)

I built an optical feedback robot arm for under $100 [1]. At work I use a robot where an individual sensor costs $100,000

The algorithms are much the same though. Doing control on cheap hardware is more challenging, so if you can do something on cheap hardware, you really have done something noteworthy! Expensive hardware pays for reduction of noise, it treats the symptoms of reality but does not solve them.

To truly solve the robotics issue of environmental noise, you have to solve it in software which is really hard but can be investigated cheap on cheap hardware. Robot projects fail because of software, not hardware normally. You should always build the software stack before spending lots of money on hardware.

[1] http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-contro...

Here are some cheap ideas:

1. Improve the robot arm control I outlined above. There is a huge market for cheap robot arms you could scale the ideas prototyped in [1] upto.

2. Active face recognition, put a camera with a zoom on a pan and tilt. Try to zoom into peoples faces for better recognition. Animals exploit shitty eye hardware with active attention in a way our current robots don't exploit.

3. voice activated inventory system for electronic components. Every hackerspace can't find the components they own. Popout a component tray via a push gantry behind it.

4. 3D hardware localization system. Actually determining the position of something is hard. Its the building block for gather training sets to do more challenging problems

I too would absolutely love to know how you can get involved with robotics as a hobby without spending and arm and a leg (assuming I have access to a workshop equipment like at TechShop or NoiseBridge).

Get a kinetic, put some wheels on it and then get ROS/PCL running on it.

Go skip diving for old printers and floppy disc drives and such like. You can get all sorts of useful steppers that way and the floppy drives in particular, if you leave the electronics attached, you can control the stepper directly with a couple of wires from a parallel port which you can trigger using something like parashell http://parashell.sourceforge.net/

Any links to tutorials where people show how to repurpose these old steppers?

Here's a good start - http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16715/Controlling-Floppy...

Merci buckets.

The arduino stepper stuff is pretty useful as well -

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Stepper?from=Tutorial.Stepper

http://arduino.cc/en/reference/stepper

http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-16-stepper...