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Dynamic Group, a Minnesota based contract manufacturer, had difficulty staffing their injection molding production and wanted to make better use of existing labor force. Three collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots have now taken over machine tending and kitting tasks resulting in improved product consistency and a 400% increase in production capacity for those applications.

Future Makers: in this movie filmed by Dezeen in London, Suryansh Chandra claims the affordable robotic arm his company Automata is developing could lead to robots becoming as ubiquitous as desktop 3D printers. "Today, every design studio has a 3D printer," Chandra says. "Soon, we hope to get to the point where every design studio has a robotic arm." Chandra founded Automata together with Mostafa Elsayed five months ago, after they became frustrated by the expense and complexity of industrial robots while working at the research division at Zaha Hadid Architects. "If you're out to get a robot today, you'd have to spend 50 or 60 thousand dollars," Chandra explains. "Our goal is to democratise robotics through a low cost hardware platform and easy to use software."

Its configuration (yaw­-roll­-roll­-yaw­-roll­-yaw) is the same one that is used on most manipulator robots that currently exist in the market. In its upright position, Thor is about 625mm and it can lift objects up to 750 grams. The project started a year ago as my Final Degree Project called "Design and startup of an Open Source and printable 6DOF robotic arm" but a lot of things have changed since the presentation day. The main purpose of this project was to create a robotic arm that could be used in universities and schools to teach robotics instead of using simulation software or low accurate models. Having this in mind, the final prototype had to be affordable and, of course, Open Source.

The KR 3 AGILUS is one of KUKA's newest robots. Fast, agile and flexible it can be used for a wide variety of tasks, including sensitive assembly in the electronics industry. In this example the KR 3 AGILUS is combined with a force torque sensor mounted on the robot flange and the KUKA.ForceTorqueControl software to assemble CPU and Memory Modules into a PCB, resulting in the highest speed and accuracy for the assembly of sensitive electronics components.

Meca500 is an affordable (US$15,000), precision six-axis robotic arm for industrial and laboratory automation, as well as research and education. It is by far the most compact and accurate collaborative robot (cobot). Indeed, the robot's controller is embedded in its base and the manipulator combines precision machined aluminum links with harmonic drive gearheads and brushless DC motors. This desktop robotic arm comes with intuitive programming and simulation software, and allows hand guiding. Meca500 can be easily interfaced through an Ethernet connection and used with ROS.