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One-Armed UBR-1 Points the Way To Cheaper Robots
waderoush writes "One of the problems that kept PR2, a two-armed humanoid robot developed by Menlo Park, CA-based Willow Garage, from succeeding commercially was its $400,000 price tag. But as it turned out, only a handful of the 40 or so universities that own PR2s ever developed applications that use both arms. That's one of the reasons why UBR-1, a mobile manipulator robot from Willow Garage spinoff Unbounded Robotics, has only one arm. And that, along with many other engineering decisions and technology improvements, will allow the startup to sell its robot for just $35,000 (it's designed for materials-handling tasks in places like warehouses, elder care facilities, and supermarkets). 'With robots, feature creep is so much more present than in some other fields,' says Unbounded co-founder and CEO Melonee Wise. 'There is always this desire to make a Swiss Army knife. But you have to make compromises, and those compromises directly impact the capabilities as well as the cost of the robot.' One roboticist told Unbounded: 'Your robot is so inexpensive that if I needed to have a second arm, I'd just buy a second robot.'"
They think removing one arm to reduce costs is a compromise?
They should speak to the engineering team who conceived the fleshlight.
When asked for a comment, the robot replied "'tis but a scratch"
At this rate, robots priced for normal people will only be able to give you the finger, just one finger, because that's all they'll have.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
'Your robot is so inexpensive that if I needed to have a second arm, I'd just buy a second robot
A single robot that can control two arms is very different from two separate robots that each have a single arm.
$400,000 for two arms down to only $35,000 for one?
That second arm must have had ``Kung-Fu Grip''.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Well, sort of. What makes it safe to be around is that it is low mass, has a low upper speed bound, and is back-drivable. The UBR-1 arm is not counterbalanced in the same way that the PR-2 arm is, so the UBR-1 arm consumes power holding up an object proportional to the torque required to hold station. That varies with how far out from the "shoulder" the load is held.
Given that you could design the mass and speed such that the arm could hold a larger load and still be safe to be around outside of a cage, large load capacity would translate into larger motors, which translates into larger batteries, which translates into a larger robot, which translates into still larger batteries. Then it starts getting expensive.