Community Combined Robot Build
Hey everyone - there's been chatter about potentially working together to build a robot as a combined community effort. I don't believe anything like that has ever been attempted (or accomplished) before, anywhere. It would sure make waves in the industry! The idea was inspired by conversation about "struggling" or "failed" robot companies. Everyone has opinion feedback on what they believe the cause of the industry stagnancy is - and there's no right or wrong opinion because at this stage of the industry, different people/companies/products are affected by different industry challenges.
And, as a optimist, I suggested "Hey, there's no shortage of industry complaints and challenges, so why don't we talk about how to turn it around and build a robot that proves us right". If someone else can do it, we can do - so I'd rather it be us
So, like, wow... I get pretty stoked thinking about this whole thing. If we come up with an agreement on what a robot should do, we can split up the responsibilities and combine them into one project. It'll also help the software grow because I imagine there would be some interesting requirements.
On that note, I've moved all of the chatter on this topic here. What do you think? Let's work together and make something awesome!
Those are the type of things I am talking about Jeremie. others; -mow my lawn -rake my leafs -shovel my snow -clean the kitchen -wash my clothes -take the garbage out -clean up clutter off the floor that a Rhoomba won't -clean the fish tank
Right on Perry! Probably a good idea to tackle and solve each problem one at a time, then once there's a robot that can do each of those things well then start thinking about combining them into a dual or multi-purpose robot. I think that everyone wants a C3PO that can do everything but we need lots of R2D2s first.
I was thinking more like 1 robot that could do any one of those well could fit into a category of a financially successful personal robot akin to the Rhoomba.
Hey Will - better to be early than late. Unless you’re waiting for someone else to make a popular robot product? I’m not
I’ll continue to support your software requirements to make robot products. And we can be responsible for the robot revolution.
If someone else will be able to do it, why can’t we? I’m made of the same material - blood sweat and beers
Bringing robots to market... I had visions of doing just that. Laundry bot was a start, then I came up with HEMI. I really wanted Hemi to not only be a Home health aide bot and eventually the all around Home companion robot, maybe even to be the arms and legs for Alexa. Im still trying to concure the lifting feature for the home health aide portion. Ive already used Invent Help to help me along with trying to get LaundryBot to market, but yeah, its a big financial undertaking, and now I would like to the same for Hemi. Meanwhile I have another design im looking into, for more a safety factot.
I like The software here, its been fun to use, sometimes fustrating, Im no programmer, I rather build the hardware, thats what I do best. I always need help with programming. One part of the programming I totally lack, is in how to give the robot its sorta own personality, Im more just utility minded, cant invision my designs being like an C3PO or B9. I need help in those areas.
The Invention of the EZB hs been the greastest thing ever I think
I use to use the BASIC Stamp back in the day. I will continue to support Ez-robot and Synthiam in all its greatness
Have you guys seen the rock pi x? We have a few here - Jeremie is going to make an adapter that clicks an EZB right to it. It’ll make it an invincible robot controller. For $79 WOW
Consumer Robots are cool but it costs a lot of money to build, promote and take a consumer robot to market. There also needs to be a return on investment for this robot. Am I going to pay $3000 for a robot snow plow when I currently pay someone $300 a year to plow my driveway?
Commercial robots have a much higher probability of success especially when they are built in conjunction with a company who actually has a business need and there is a return on investment. It needs to be cheaper to perform the task with robotics than doing the task manually.
Walk into your local McDonalds and someone is paid to open a bag of French fries, tip them in a basket, put the basket in oil, set a timer, wait 2 minutes, take the basket out, tip it into a tray, add salt, mix them up, put them in a cardboard container and put the container in a bag. You could easily build a prototype robot to do this for around 50K. If you built robot fry machines in bulk maybe 10K each. If it is a busy 24*7 McDonalds the cost for Labour to do that is probably over 100K per year. No sick days and an easy return on investment.
There is about 20 bulldozers sitting idle at the end of my street. They are building a new subdivision. They work Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm and today is Sunday so no work is being done. For around 100K we could add robotics and remote control a Bulldozer with something like exosphere, add some self driving automation, an AI program with the subdivision plans loaded and you could do the job in half the time with half the number of bulldozers. These large bulldozers cost approx $175K each and in high volume production we could probably automate a bulldozer for <20K each. There is an easy ROI. Even if you just remote controlled them from India using exosphere and low cost resources there is a business case. You could then use the data in production with machine learning you can teach the bulldozers to operate on their own, further improving the business case.
If we want robots to be successful we need to develop robotic solutions that automate manual tasks where there is an ROI. Synthiam is a great product to do that with as you can build a prototype very quickly.
A few years ago, object recognition would also have been on this list, but I think we have made huge advancements there in the past couple of years and are close enough that at least some of these uses are possible.
The one I would add, that would take significant advance in object recognition would be "weed my garden". A task that I detest doing, but even I pull out the good plants half the time and not just the weeds, so a robot would need to have excellent recognition (If Google had an API to Google Lens it might work. It is pretty good at identifying what a plant is. but we would still need to tell it if the plant was desired or a weed).
I would also like to see us do more with assisting the sick, elderly, or disabled. So many seem to focus on using the robot for companionship. Jibo was great at that, but failed because it had no ability to do anything physically useful (IMHO). My elderly and physically struggling mother has no problems there since discovering Zoom and Facebook Messenger so she can communicate with friends and family and participate in events. Her issue is picking up things she has dropped, finding things she has misplaced (like her glasses that went missing for a week) or retrieving her 4x daily medications from the kitchen counter and reminding her to take them. This would not need total autonomy so much as accurate object avoidance. She could direct it by voice or possibly joystick to go to the right place, and to get back to a charger, although a roll on charger would be critical because she no longer has the hand strength to plug and unplug from the wall, nor the dexterity to deal with something like a DEANS connector.
Alan