When Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in 1975, they set a goal to put "a computer on every desk in every home." Now some forty years later, a Chinese start-up is hoping to do the same with robot arms. "We really think [a robot arm] can make lives easier for people," says Tony Le, one of three co-founders of uFactory, a start-up in Southern China that builds desktop robot appendages dubbed the uArm. The very first model came out in 2014 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign -- raised US$250,000, more than 20 times their initial goal -- and led to a fun video showing the first-gen uArm making breakfast for a tech writer (while also making a huge mess). Le concedes that early model wasn't "that good" -- he and the company's co-founders built it for fun and didn't expect the Kickstarter campaign to blow up the way it did -- but they're back with two new models on Indiegogo.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in 1975, they set a goal to put "a computer on every desk in every home." Now some forty years later, a Chinese start-up is hoping to do the same with robot arms. "We really think [a robot arm] can make lives easier for people," says Tony Le, one of three co-founders of uFactory, a start-up in Southern China that builds desktop robot appendages dubbed the UArm. The very first model came out in 2014 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign -- raised US$250,000, more than 20 times their initial goal -- and led to a fun video showing the first-gen uArm making breakfast for a tech writer (while also making a huge mess). Le concedes that early model wasn't "that good" -- he and the company's co-founders built it for fun and didn't expect the Kickstarter campaign to blow up the way it did -- but they're back with two new models on Indiegogo.