Living with an Industrial Robot in Isolation

Daniele Caltabiano shows off what he's been doing with his revived Yaskawa Motoman MH5LF robot arm.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoRobotics

As Daniele Caltabiano puts it, “An industrial robot is generally a very complicated (and expensive) piece of engineering.” Nonetheless, four months ago, he decided to purchase a Yaskawa Motoman MH5LF with a lot of missing parts, including the controller. Impressively, he’s been able to revive this robot to a working state, using Python to compute the inverse kinematics for the joints, what appears to be a 3D-printed hand as end-of-arm tooling, and some sort of elbow attachment that may house a camera and/or microphone assembly.

While details of the "Yasky-bot" build are fairly general, the chances that you'll be buying and reviving such a robot are admittedly fairly low. What might be of more interest, however, is what it’s like living with your own industrial robot. Caltabiano shows but a few of the possibilities in the videos below.

Ideas include brushing your teeth, and having it actuate a TV remote control for you under voice command. The other concept presented is that if you have a classic useless machine that turns itself off, why not make the switching it on electronically-actuated as well? His new setup flips the box’s switch with the robot finger, allowing the two systems to interact. Caltabiano’s cat seems quite amused at the whole process.

One might note that these type of robots are generally enclosed in a safety cage, and having the innards of an electrical cabinet exposed in your living room isn't exactly standard practice. Therefore, trying this at home may not advisable. Conversely, who knows, maybe someday you'll visit the robo-dentist for a teeth cleaning!

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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