Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Relatively speaking, that is a very attractive price point. More realistically, the amount of
customization required to equip the Baxter unit to handle your unique components will
send that starting price a good bit higher before any amount of utility can be realized from
this system.
It is clear that the industrial automation industry is in great need of, and ripe with op-
portunity for, open source solutions to be developed and shared with the world. A
Boulder, Colorado, company called Modular Robotics has been contributing an open
source testing platform called FARKUS that has led the way in open source automated
PCB testing. Other groups are working on creating open source PCB mills, pick-and-place
machines, and reflow ovens. The parts, materials, and infrastructure for supporting an
open source model of automated assembly machinery implementation are already in exist-
ence. With the right incentives, more open source automated assembly solutions will
likely emerge and would be expected to realize similar successes to those seen in the gen-
eral open source hardware movement of the last decade.
Because the products that most manufacturers, of any size, will be assembling are one-
of-a-kind items, the amount of customization that will be required to introduce automated
assembly solutions to any manufacturing operation will need to be as unique as each
product being built. Therefore an open source automated assembly machinery design will
find the most success, in terms of market penetration, when that design is accompanied by
very clear documentation and a strong support community whose members assist one an-
other by sharing and teaching others how to build up customized versions of the system
that can deliver useful and efficient results for each user's unique application. This model
has already proved wildly successful for Arduino, and it could produce similar results if
replicated for industrial automation applications.
Anecdote: Open Source Factory Automation
Eric Schweikardt
We make robot construction kits like Cubelets and MOSS, and we
make them in our own little factory in Boulder, Colorado. People think
that this is completely crazy, but it's not. We don't manufacture our ro-
bots here because we're particularly patriotic or because we want to set
an example of altruism: we do it because it makes better sense for us
from a business (and particularly a financial) perspective.
Oddly, the decision to manufacture our products ourselves began on
a flight home from China, where we had visited five contract manufac-
turers to talk about making our products for us. I was filled with unease
on that flight home; contract manufacturing just seemed wrong for our
