The robotics community craving for precise and cheaply robots. The Carbon Robotics company apparently felt this trend and planned to release a seriously affordable and precise robot arm. They called Katia.
Let’s start with the price.
According to Engadget, they plan to sell Katia at a price of $1,999 starting from this March. At the first glance, it doesn’t seem a reasonable price. But when we compare with other robot arms from the same category, the things change drastically for Katia. For example, JACO2 is a six degrees robotic manipulator priced at $29,950. Seems to have too many digits in the price even if the specs of the arm are more impressive than Katia.
Katia is designed for students, hackers, makers, but its main goal is the industrial area. It’s not Baxter, but with some improvements, it can handle objects as heavy as 1 kilogram with a sub-millimeter precision. This is quite impressive for an under $2000 robot arm. The arm has a radius of 1 meters, which is enough to include it on a small production line.
You don’t need a Ph.D. in software programming and years of experience to work with Katia. You can guide manually the arm, record the motions and then the arm replays the motions; or you can access the API with already known tools like Arduino and Python.
The structure of the arm is opened and simple. On the upper part of the arm, you don’t have a hand attached, you have just a modular system for tools. Do you want to move objects – attach a gripper; do you want to make a movie – attach a camera. You have endless possibilities.
The robot arm is still in development and there are future plans. The team plans to develop a sensory system able to detect the presence in a close range of objects and humans.
A good price. Hackable. Modular and extendable with endless possibilities. Logically, this is a good tool for students, hackers, makers, and small industrial applications.
Meet Carbon Robotics, presenting their robotic arm(KATIA)