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Shake Hands with Eva, Automata's 3D Printed Robotic Arm

Robotic digital fabrication is poised to make a giant impact on the future of design and making.  With lights-out manufacturing factories on the rise (beyond the automotive industry), and powerful computing technologies becoming more and more accessible, we will be seeing a lot of automation by way of robotics in the years to come.

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Mostafa ElSayed & Suryansh Chandra are aware of this as well, which is why they formed Automata in 2015. They’ve been iterating the design of a cool, 3D printable robotic arm that’s about the size of an average human arm.  For individual consumers, small businesses, and small enterprise markets, the robotic arm holds a lot of promise, according to Automata’s website.

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The Automata site reads, “We believe robotic automation can bring a huge amount of creativity in addition to enhancing productivity to small businesses and individual users. Over the coming years, these will change the way we live and work. But first, these robots need to become a whole lot easier to use, safer to work beside, and substantially more affordable. Eva is our first product in our commitment to meet those goals, by being a low-cost, easy to use and lightweight robotic arm. We like to think of Eva as an assistant that can give you a helping hand in a variety of uses whether you’re a business, hobbyist, or an educator.”

For DIY robotics folks, Eva represents a great design to manipulate, alter and program.  The arm weighs only 2.5 kg and the exoskeleton outer shell and some functional components are 3D printed, with the arm’s precision movements at 1 mm, and 6 DOF (degrees of freedom).

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Automata has been working on their choreoGraph app that makes programming Eva as easy as playing a smartphone game.  We’ll have to wait until Eva and choreoGraph hit the market, but according to the dynamic duo behind Automata, users can move the arm in a motion or action you would like it to repeat, and the software will record, recall and direct the arm to repeat it.  Sounds simple, but we’ll see.

Automata is still iterating and probably will be right up until they release it into the wild, but the current word is that they are trying to bring the price point to under $2,000. We’ll just have to wait and find out.  With the growing number of robotic arms used for unique 3D printing processes, Eva and 3D printing may just go hand in hand.