

Redwood Robotics wants to do for robot arms what Apple did for PCs - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/05/04/redwood-robotics-aims-to-build-next-generation-of-robot-arms/

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ChuckMcM
This is really good news. Robotics can be a lot of fun, but rolling around and
avoiding walls gets some people interested, balancing on 2 wheels others, but
the gap has been reaching out and touching things.

I built a LynxMotion arm [1] when they came out and it was great for
kinematics but its ability to lift things was very limited. My goal of a robot
that would go to the fridge and fetch me a Diet Dr. Pepper eluded me for a
quarter century. The Willow Garage PR-2 can do that now, its truly awesome,
but as with other things there is so much custom stuff its hard to make it
accessible to 'regular' folks.

I really hope these guys, and Heartland (Rod Brook's effort) are successful.

[1] <http://www.lynxmotion.com/c-130-al5d.aspx>

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devindotcom
I think this is great. With hardware like robots, modularity is a missing link
right now. So many labs have to create the chassis, materials, locomotion,
vision system, control software, wireless stack, everything either from
scratch or form scattered resources. That totally integrated approach just
doesn't work well in electronics as sophisticated as this. I look forward to
seeing more organ and limb and "brain" specializations in robot labs.

