Put a Miniature Robot Arm on Your Desk

Open-source Shenzhen startup uFactory (we mentioned their ball-balancing robot recently) has announced a new crowdfunding campaign for uArm, a robotic arm that’s small enough to fit on your desk.

It consists of a servo-driven robotic arm on a rotating base, with the base containing the heart of the uArm, an Arduino Uno clone with a custom shield that controls the servos. The campaign offers multiple manipulator tools for the arm: the obvious gripper, as well as one of the coolest features of the project, a vacuum-pump-driven suction cup. You can see this in action as the arm unboxes an iPhone.