People have been making end effectors using hobby servos for ages. These servomotors are designed for use in an RC aircraft, they're light, cheap, and expendable.
Industrial needs care not about weight, care less about cost, and care a great deal about capability, repeatability, and reliability.
This is a cool project for a hobbyist but it's not meant to be a serious industrial machine.
Edit: what is with this thread? Lots of very generic positive comments here but not much thinking about what this is actually useful for.
What you're missing is: today, we're nearing the point where actual general purpose robots become viable.
Which means: the purpose of a robot is no longer to sit at a factory line and precisely execute the same exact motions on repeat 24/7. The purpose of the next generation of robots is to learn generalized behaviors, adapt to circumstances, and carry out circumstance-specific actions with active sensor feedback. Which means completely different requirements for effectors.
Which means: repeatability can go get fucked, for one.
Humanoid robotics research was pretty popular in the early 2000s already, with remarkable, reproducible results not only in videos. It’s definitively more present in the media now.
Industrial needs care not about weight, care less about cost, and care a great deal about capability, repeatability, and reliability.
This is a cool project for a hobbyist but it's not meant to be a serious industrial machine.
Edit: what is with this thread? Lots of very generic positive comments here but not much thinking about what this is actually useful for.