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conductr • yesterday at 7:05 PM • 8 replies • view on HN

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


Replies

3RTB297 • today at 5:24 AM

It seems like it will work well if you know you have a situation that fits well with the setup. Do you spend 4+ hours out of the house and this is in a large, rectangular room with no one walking through? Perfect.

Two people have mentioned garden applications, so maybe back yard and outside applications are where the creator needs to explore.

Though, I agree that my spouse would rather burn the house down than set this up in the living room where cables would be "ugly" and not match with our decor.

simon01 • yesterday at 7:13 PM

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

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Karliss • yesterday at 8:05 PM

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.

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BorisMelnik • yesterday at 7:23 PM

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 • yesterday at 7:20 PM

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 • yesterday at 8:14 PM

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 • yesterday at 8:05 PM

Same here I had a 3rd step in my thinking though:

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

supersimpleguy • yesterday at 10:00 PM

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