Blue Is a New Low-Cost Force-Controlled Robot Arm from UC Berkeley

Robots are well-known for being very good at some very specific things. They're often defined by words like "precision" and "repeatability" and "speed," because if you want a robot to be uniquely useful, it's usually going to have to leverage one or more of those characteristics in a way that makes it better at some specific task than humans are. Robots have been doing this for decades, typically in places like industrial settings, but things are starting to change, and roboticists are beginning to look towards other applications in more unconstrained, dynamic environments, like non-industrial settings. Such environments (our homes, for example) are the kinds of places that we really, really want robots to be useful in. We want them doing our chores so that we don't have to, ideally without causing catastrophic damage or injury at the same time.