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by No1 501 days ago
“Open source is truly democratizing the field of robotics.”

Uh, when was GPT-4o made open source?

2 comments

A decade ago robotic arms like the ones in the video would have cost thousands - if one that small and simple were available at all without bespoke development. Now they’re a cheap kit and go up to six DoF and all kinds of end affectors.
What are some good brands of robotic arms that do this and are easily programmable?
The one in the video is the SO-100: https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100

There are now too many to mention and you can but some off Amazon for under $150 (I’m used to Staublis and Fanucs at work so I don’t know which cheap ones are best). None of them are easily programmable. They’re easy to control but making them do the physical action you want is a lot harder - most of the time it’s literally a bunch of instructions like “turn motor 1 23 degrees clockwise” that’s carefully tested to be repeatable. That’s been a problem in industrial automation since they first came out.

That’s why transformers are interesting in robotics, there’s been quite a bit of research (much of it popping up on the HN front page) about using transformers model to control the robot. Hopefully there will be a big breakthrough here in the next few years and robotic arms become easier to use.

Guy thought the open in OpenAI means open source