YHK - yet another hacker news clone

OpenArm: An open-source 7DOF humanoid arm

151 points Lwrless 1 day ago 30 comments

NegativeLatency 8 hours ago | parent

Crosses fingers for a general purpose laundry folding bot

smokel 7 hours ago | parent

We've come a long way from watching 50x speedups [1] to real-time [2] videos of watching robots fold clothes, student-style.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo

[2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0

num42 7 hours ago | parent

Off-topic, but even though it was 16 years ago, the robot looks so beautiful and well-designed. It looks so aesthetic!

King-Aaron 7 hours ago | parent

I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.

nannal 7 hours ago | parent

House scale Faraday cages and an airlock for fiber optics. Should be sufficient until maybe 2032.

mxmilkiib 6 hours ago | parent

I've got a collection of socks needing darning!

bluebarbet 5 hours ago | parent

To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.

embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent

I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.

showerst 42 minutes ago | parent

Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.

nater5000 36 minutes ago | parent

People are consuming useless plastic toys at an unfathomable rate. It's one example, but it likely contributes so much more to the stress on our planet than actual robots capable of providing actual utility by a huge margin. I'll question the use of humanity's resources once we reel in behaviors like that a bit.

NetOpWibby 7 hours ago | parent

One step closer to becoming Adam Jensen

King-Aaron 7 hours ago | parent

Or Smasher, there's a few Adams we're taking steps towards

tsumnia 15 minutes ago | parent

You don't say... XD

nicman23 7 hours ago | parent

i asked for this

ethanwillis 7 hours ago | parent

  A fully open-source humanoid arm for physical 
  AI research and deployment in contact-rich 
  environments.
When will someone release this but for deployment in target-rich environments?

hobofan 4 hours ago | parent

I think in target-rich environments, the humanoid form is pretty easy to beat.

donpdonp 6 hours ago | parent

$6,500 for OpenArm v2. Incredibly smooth movement, 4kg of load per arm. Its unclear how far the level of autonomous control has come so far. The video shows mostly tele-operated operation. I have to agree with other comments here that folding laundry is the killer app.

moffkalast 5 hours ago | parent

One would expect it to at least have calibration and inverse kinematics solved. That's still a massive pain point for the SO-ARM101 despite it being so common now, since there's no base_link to gripper calibration nor sag compensation and every center offset stacks.

Lerobot banked on having full DL control of each joint so they wouldn't have to do that properly, but now VLAs just use inverse kinematics as a crutch and predict gripper offsets, so we're back to square one.

drapado 5 hours ago | parent

Hi! do you have any references for VLAs using inverse kinematics? I'm very curious and can't find much

moffkalast 4 hours ago | parent

I'm not super up to date on new releases, the one I'm most familiar with is X-VLA which predicts gripper poses and relative movement deltas for kinematics to move to instead of joints, and trains on forward kinematic gripper poses. I think Intern and Octo have the same approach.

teamolHuang 6 hours ago | parent

Finally, automatic hand for single man

subscribed 1 hour ago | parent

That came out more sexist than funny.

MrPapz 4 hours ago | parent

This would be great to take advanced healthcare like surgery to remote communities!

PowerElectronix 3 hours ago | parent

I hope someone teaches it to perform a highly sophisticated secret handshake.

officialchicken 3 hours ago | parent

Seriously, Are we nunchaku yet? If so, I would like a Bruce Lee edition in classic yellow.

guestbest 1 hour ago | parent

Reminds me of the armatron from Radio Shack

prometheus1992 1 hour ago | parent

i'm not really sure if people are being sarcastic about laundry folding being the real application of this because I have never felt in my life that i want a robot folding my laundry. i actually love folding my laundry.

slfnflctd 51 minutes ago | parent

It's a huge milestone for robotic capabilities more generally. This particular problem has been discussed a ton in robotics communities. It requires a gentle-but-firm grip and extreme dexterity across a wide range of shapes, sizes, weights, densities and material types.

If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.

Plus there are also people who don't like folding laundry. Like me.

prometheus1992 7 minutes ago | parent

>>> If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.

I see, is it like arc agi but for robots? wouldn't the companies just laundryfold-maxx their robots then?

westurner 1 hour ago | parent

- enactic/openarm_mujoco: https://github.com/enactic/openarm_mujoco

- "Robots – Comprehensive catalog of 115 humanoid and quadruped robots" re: MJCF in mujoco_menagerie, awesomerobots, robot-descriptions/awesome-robot-descriptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727432

- I can think of at least one museum that already has interactive demo robot arms that are in need of repair or replacement