I have a Baxter Research Robot. The theory was that you would make up for the imprecise gear train (backlash at the gripper of 10-20 mm) with visual servoing. But this turns out to be hard. A big limitation is that the gripper-mounted cameras are 30 FPS (less if you try to use both) and add a full frame of delay, so the visual servo loop has to be really slow (like, 1/2 second to zero in on an object). That means it's far less productive at simple operations like loading parts into boxes than humans.

Also, its industrial design is really bad. I hate its hulking arms and smiling animated face. It's surprising that you can ruin an industrial product with ugly visual design, but there you are. For another example, see the Boeing X-32. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32#/media/File:USAF_X...

Rant: Sheesh, now even Wikipedia is using full-page JS popups that fail to load and make the page unusable. Seriously webdevs of the world, do we actually test our own work on phones?

At least I was able to see the image first. I was wondering how much of the X-32's shape was constrained by functional requirements, and the same for the Baxter. Can a safer arm be made without looking as you describe?

The X-32 and X-35 were two candidate designs for the Joint Strike Fighter. The X-35 was chosen. They had the same functional requirements, but the X-35 looked less silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-35

You could easily avoid having a decorative face. The general arm configuration might look OK with some other ID.

What do you use yours for?

Machine learning research. But I'm currently using Fetch and simulations instead.

Baxter is supposed to be safe around humans, but to achieve this, they had to make it weak and slow. So it underperforms competing industrial robots. Compare: Baxter and Sawyer: [1] Festo: [2].

It's also not precise enough for precision assembly. Baxter videos show it stacking medium sized parts, not assembling cell phones.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPth0Q4apLU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40

In between you have stuff like Universal Robots' stuff which is human safe and relatively fast. For a startup knowing that the arm you're using isn't going to kill anyone[1] is huge in terms of being able to develop stuff quickly.

https://www.universal-robots.com/

[1] Or kill yourself with it, I've managed to hit myself in the head but didn't even get a bruise.