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obligatory shout out to Annin Robotics AR4. Here is my build: https://commandpattern.org/2023/03/19/ar4-robotic-arm-build/

$2K USD. 2kg payload. millimeter repeatability (if you build it well :)

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Nice build! I always wanted one of those AR robot arms but I'd rather buy it off-the-shelf than assemble from scratch. I don't think anyone sells them pre-built though. This type of 'high level hobbyist robotics' is in a bit of business dead-zone unfortunately, as it's some combination of too small a market and not enough use cases to justify having a company around. Or maybe there's potential there but no one's thought of it yet.

Btw I bet your arm's movement smoothness can be improved with some different deceleration rates. It was really fun watching it sort those beans!

My research goal with one of these 'good enough' 1mm repeatability robots would be vision-guided adaptive control to complete tasks after seeing examples of them done via human manual control. Would be a really interesting ML/AI problem. Just need a reasonable hardware platform to get started. Right now I'm leaning more towards simple/smaller servo motors like in the OP of this post (plus there's the cost/time trade-off).

this is where my research is going. camera -> llm -> targets -> tasks -> ros2 arm :)

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