Can hobby roboticists save A Country's industry?

[mklrobo]

  Hello!
I was listening to Glenn Beck, and he brought up the cost of labor in industry.
Some countries reduce their labor cost to almost nothing, (bad for the individual)
and make them very competitive to make products.
What if hobby roboticists started an open source robot to be used in industry for manual
labor? Could it be done? This would reduce the labor cost to the cost/maintenance of the robot.
With the new batteries (Powerplus - 13.2 ampere hour) and the CPU power available, it may be possible!
this would create jobs for techs, provide cheap manual labor, and help build up the country that is using the Robots. What do you think?

[cyberjeff]

Hello!
I was listening to Glenn Beck, and he brought up the cost of labor in industry.
Some countries reduce their labor cost to almost nothing, (bad for the individual)
and make them very competitive to make products.
What if hobby roboticists started an open source robot to be used in industry for manual
labor? Could it be done? This would reduce the labor cost to the cost/maintenance of the robot.
With the new batteries (Powerplus - 13.2 ampere hour) and the CPU power available, it may be possible!
this would create jobs for techs, provide cheap manual labor, and help build up the country that is using the Robots. What do you think?

Manufacturing is full of industrial robots. These are powerful machines and although expensive, they are less  than the cost of human labor.

I live in the US, here the economy is driven more by services than manufacturing. And the service business that is growing fastest is healthcare (note Japanese heavy involvement in robotics as well as an aging population). Where I think hobbyist have an opening is not in the mechanics but in the software end and the development of artificial intelligence. Building software is cheap, building rugged strong hardware is very expensive.

At any rate doing something that has already been done does not advance anything. What more can be done with wheels that isn't already done? Which is why I have been studying legged robots and what I have discovered is a fertile but largely untended field. The designs out there are deeply flawed, for example, the vast majority of the quadruped robots are almost square in shape and that is an architecture almost doomed to fail. Take a square card table and fold up one leg and it will fall. This why there are no squarish animals, except ones like tortoises that spend their lives already on the ground.

So, where hobbyist can make a difference is in exploring new ground, developing new ideas that may not have a short term return on investment. I don't see how any of us are going to make a better industrial robot. But it is possible that we may find techniques and architecture that will break open new fields.

[mklrobo]

  Awesome input!
I am exploring my own leg system, and it is quite energy demanding. 
I was hoping some robotic tech could create a humanoid robot (like Chappie) to
do the manual labor.(Farming, small business labor) 

[cyberjeff]

Awesome input!
I am exploring my own leg system, and it is quite energy demanding. 
I was hoping some robotic tech could create a humanoid robot (like Chappie) to
do the manual labor.(Farming, small business labor) 

I've spent a lot of time studying cats lately, what their skeleton looks like and how they move. So, I have a very good idea of why they are built the way they are and why the skeleton moves as it does. A good bit of why quadrupeds are stable on 3 legs has to do with where the center of gravity is. The weight of the head and neck brings this forward to not far behind the shoulders. A quadruped can not walk without a head extending out and shifting the CG forward. I've plotted this out on plain old graph paper!

 After plotting footfall patterns for walking I found that the cat is statically stable over a good bit of 3 legged positions, it is at the extremes of the walking gate that momentum must carry through.

Bipeds are different and rely on the foot to be statically stable, it can never statically balance on 2 points. Now, take a look at Mossimo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qrLOtgYIWs

Mossimo does not actually walk like a human, the legs never stretch out, and are in fact closer to the rear leg of a quadruped. Note also the large feet (which is unneeded in a quadruped). Note also how it shifts it's torso  back and forward to adjust the CG.

  What I am suggesting is that you plot out leg and body movements and tipping points and see what you discover. You can not build a successful biped or quadruped without the geometry being correct,  the architecture has to follow the math. What happens is that most people build out of what robot parts are available and the geometry and CG gets pushed back in importance where as it should be the first concern, not the last.

With my quadruped I had a real starting point as I went from nature, and what I found is that nature does things for good reasons. We need to consider the why and learn from it.