[LeifCarrotson]

Literally standing in front of a proprietary Fanuc industrial 6-axis arm waiting for Roboguide at the moment... this is already a wide scale industry and shows low probability to trend towards open and repairable technology.

There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.

It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.

[delfinom]

Personal experience.

Fanuc robots are straight forward to service, they make the parts very available to do it yourself if you want. We order them here and there no problem.

But they are beasts and it can take an entire day just to replace a part. Then you have to reassemble it in the right order. None of it is made difficult on purpose. It has tight tolerances, and fancy shit like harmonic drives for zero backlash and more.

[theossuary]

I don't know. I remember trying to get lower level servo metrics out of Fanuc arms into a historian and they laughed and said they had their own preventative maintenance service I could sign up for; but they wouldn't expose the same info to me to use.

[owenpalmer]

Currently in the process of trying to make a VR interface for roboguide. It's very challenging to hack around what they give you. I wish it was simpler to extend the software, but it requires an additional fee just to have the capability to make an extension. I'll admit FANUC can be pretty greedy when it comes to piling on the licenses just to do simple stuff.