Top
Best
New

Posted by nharada 4 hours ago

Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot(neufangled.com)
188 points | 90 comments
barbazoo 1 minute ago|
> Tension is all you need

Rarely does a product announcement make me laugh out loud :)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need)

nhnifong 35 minutes ago||
Hi there, I'm Nathaniel, the creator of this robot. Thanks for posting it :) If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Can it kill you? no probably not. The tension limit kicks in and lets the line out if you pull too hard.

Will it work in a room with a ceiling fan? usually its fine since you can lower the work area ceiling to exclude the fan.

Will it make my kids learn to not pick up after themselves? They never will anyways.

0xdeadbeefbabe 22 minutes ago|
If I had this I could get a roomba. Does that make sense?
bigwheels 2 hours ago||
It's an interesting concept, but I think I'll hold out for the full-body humanoid version.

There is an undeniable allure to the idea of a bipedal chassis realizing I'm an inefficient drain on corporate resources, then stabbing me to death while I sleep due to a minor Terms of Service violation.

tootie 1 hour ago||
The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal. Ceiling mounted is actually a much more plausible option. Next most likely is something more like R2D2. A rolling garbage can with an arbitrary number of specialized appendages. Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.
onlyrealcuzzo 2 minutes ago|||
> Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.

We built the world for us, not for the most sensible robot.

So for generalized solutions, a good biped will have some advantages.

kevin_thibedeau 1 hour ago||||
Their benefit is they can operate in any space designed for a human without custom modification. No wires to get in the way with an assistant robot that interacts with the existing built world.
bryanlarsen 44 minutes ago||
Much smaller robots will co-exist in a world with humans a lot more smoothly than anything human shaped & sized.
blm126 9 minutes ago|||
I'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.
pulvinar 22 minutes ago|||
Yes, once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.
bryanlarsen 13 minutes ago||
They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.
hathawsh 1 hour ago||||
We might be at the beginning of a golden age for inventors. Robots of all shapes and sizes, with highly variable price points and specialization. Still, the first challenge for R2D2 is probably stairs.
chamomeal 15 minutes ago||
It’ll be like phones. All kinds of whacky fun designs, before converging on a single black rectangle. Robots will all be flat black rectangles
arbuge 47 minutes ago||||
How does R2D2 climb stebs?
Marha01 1 hour ago|||
The big benefit of humanoids is that they can be trained from captured human actions (egocentric datasets made by humans).
jephs 56 minutes ago|||
Do we really have to capture the humans? Legal says that introduces a whole slew of issues.
komodo99 1 hour ago|||
> captured human actions

Or just some dude on remote. (Get in the robot, Shinji!)

weirdish 2 hours ago|||
I'm sure with a little ingenuity you could rig up stringman to stab you to death!
fidotron 2 hours ago|||
Getting it to be forceful enough would be a bit interesting. Could certainly slowly strangle you in the cabling.
Bluestein 10 minutes ago|||
Drop a sharp item on you from a sufficient height? :/
monkmartinez 2 hours ago||||
It could also strangle you super fast, see here; Red Cable Robots Video[1]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIr0ZtVVnBA

nancyminusone 2 hours ago||||
Depending on how high your ceilings are, dropping items from height could be quite uncomfortable.
jacquesm 1 hour ago||||
Gravity assist...
fidotron 1 hour ago||
Honestly I had been thinking more in terms of a crossbow/harpoon type attachment. Fire, rewind, tension up, fire again etc.
embedding-shape 1 hour ago|||
> Could certainly slowly strangle you in the cabling

Reminds me of the engineer who accidentally strangled himself with his contraption:

> He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). - "The Man Who Accidentally Poisoned the Planet Twice": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

jacquesm 1 hour ago||
That's straight out of Douglas Adams.

"Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. "

adamsmark 2 hours ago||||
Poison tipped syringe!
smnplk 2 hours ago|||
This reads very futuramaesque
doctorzook 2 hours ago||
Slow and horrible, please.
KumaBear 2 hours ago|||
Why humanoid though. I’d want the most efficient design to complete the task at hand. Even if the thing looks like a hybrid of an octopus meets Freddy Krueger
app134 1 hour ago|||
The world is already designed for the humanoid for factor. Instead of designing 1001 specialized robots, why not design one that can already use the stuff we have lying around?
dyauspitr 2 hours ago|||
The difference is, I want the most efficient design that can complete every physical task that I can. That design is probably humanoid.
schiffern 1 hour ago||
In non-murder tasks, humans are already obsolete. Our remaining economic value is solely alignment arbitrage, eg solving CAPTCHAs, murder, submitting 'human' papers, etc.

Given abliterated open models, Stringman is coming for our last remaining job!

pseidemann 1 hour ago|||
This also elegantly defines the meaning of (modern) life: comply.
failbuffer 1 hour ago|||
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
strangattractor 1 hour ago||
Sorry - Over price claw machine:)
conductr 2 hours ago||
My thoughts while watching the video

Robot picks up clothes -> this is stupid

Robot picks up kids toys -> this is brilliant

In reality though, I think the cables will never work in a household situation. It's a interesting concept and I'm sure it was fun to build :) Makes me wonder what commercial application this would work for, I'm sure there's something out there that would benefit from this over waiting on humanoid tech

simon01 2 hours ago||
When I was 12, it was my job to pick up all the toys my much younger sibling had thrown around all house. I spent an hour every day doing that. I wish someone had gave something like this back then. It would save hundreds of hours
conductr 2 hours ago||
lol. I had much younger siblings too and have memories of pulling out the dust pan and broom if I had to clean after them. Luckily wasn’t my daily job, yikes!
Karliss 1 hour ago|||
Only widespread commercial application of cable robots I have seen is cameras in stadiums and concert venues.

I guess in most industrial use cases it makes more sense to have a robot stationary and move the parts around with conveyors. Doing it that way allows to pipeline and parallelize the manufacturing process. In contrast the large operating volume covered by cable robot needs to be served by single robot exclusively.

daemonologist 1 hour ago||
I've always thought they could be good in agriculture (can't pipeline the ground, after all). Dealing with wind would probably require a ~fully constrained 6 line system though.
BorisMelnik 2 hours ago|||
I'm thinking about the legos with chocolate milk spilled all over it, or the bowl of cereal sitting on top of the kids toys.

I wonder how it would handle something like a blanket or pillow on top of the toys

nomel 2 hours ago|||
A fourth cable would allow you to keep the other three constrained up high, with fourth being to lower. Would require some close looped control to eliminate swaying though.
tootie 1 hour ago|||
For $800 I think it's pretty incredible. If something like this is plausible then you may see a future version built with rails.
d--b 1 hour ago||
Same here I had a 3rd step in my thinking though:

Robot can't open ikea drawers -> this is not gonna work

monkmartinez 2 hours ago||
Awesome!!! I love projects like this.

Reminded me of the Hangprinter https://github.com/tobbelobb/hangprinter which has been around for around for long time... always wanted to build one.

ETA: https://hangprinter.org/

CodeWriter23 32 minutes ago||
Do you think it can be scaled down to pick from random pile of M2-M5 bolts and sort into Gridfinity bins?
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 1 hour ago||
Awesome! Though I'm thinking that you can do MUCH MUCH more things with 2 grippers than with one. Has all been tried in terms of weight management to instead of having a motor in the air with a gripper, putting two motors on each end corner of the ceiling that can pull a line tethered to a (in the air) pulley system that grasps? You could then have say 4 lines to pull (1 left grip, 1 right grip, 1 to adjust both gripper's distance, 1 to rotate the in the air platform).
yathern 2 hours ago||
Very clever - and I love "tension is all you need"
Hasz 2 hours ago||
To those asking about more demanding tasks, I totally think this thing could scale up, reminds me of Maslow CNC (and predecessors):

https://www.maslowcnc.com/

basically a cable driven 4x8 sheet router.

structuredPizza 1 hour ago|
I was working on something similar, stoked to see this type of project making it out of the labs! The inspiration for most similar systems are industrial settings with automated bridge cranes which are fantastic, almost surgical when everything is symmetrical in the active environment.
More comments...