Manufacturing Magazine January 2016 | Page 10

LEADERSHIP
totally committed to making the solutions more affordable and easy to use for the masses .
We ’ re aiming to address the challenges outlined above with Eva , our first product which is a plastic six-axis robotic arm . Eva is made up of 75 separate 3D printed parts , and was brought to life with tools such as Autodesk Fusion 360 , Meshmixer for design optimisation and Maya for rendering and animation . Weighing 2.5 kilograms – roughly the same as a laptop – and costing between $ 2,500 and $ 3,000 , Eva is considerably less expensive and more lightweight than many robotics solutions available today . 3D printing has been integral to helping us tackle these issues , enabling us to produce far lighter parts that we don ’ t have to purchase off-the-shelf .
Looking to address the skills gap in robotics , developing an intuitive operating system was as important to us as producing a low cost hardware platform . We therefore came up with ‘ choreoGraph ’ a software platform that ’ s been designed to be as easy to use as any smartphone app ; reducing the need to train up staff to handle Eva . The robotic arm can be programmed by moving it through repetitive tasks , which it can learn and
10 J anuary 2016