This is really good news. Robotics can be a lot of fun, but rolling around and avoiding walls gets some people interested, balancing on 2 wheels others, but the gap has been reaching out and touching things.<p>I built a LynxMotion arm [1] when they came out and it was great for kinematics but its ability to lift things was very limited. My goal of a robot that would go to the fridge and fetch me a Diet Dr. Pepper eluded me for a quarter century. The Willow Garage PR-2 can do that now, its truly awesome, but as with other things there is so much custom stuff its hard to make it accessible to 'regular' folks.<p>I really hope these guys, and Heartland (Rod Brook's effort) are successful.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.lynxmotion.com/c-130-al5d.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.lynxmotion.com/c-130-al5d.aspx</a>
I think this is great. With hardware like robots, modularity is a missing link right now. So many labs have to create the chassis, materials, locomotion, vision system, control software, wireless stack, everything either from scratch or form scattered resources. That totally integrated approach just doesn't work well in electronics as sophisticated as this. I look forward to seeing more organ and limb and "brain" specializations in robot labs.