Congrats to Meka on the official announcement of their M1 Mobile Manipulation platform! The M1 integrates many existing Meka hardware products into a unified mobile manipulation platform. This includes:
- S3 Sensor Head with Kinect-compatible interface and 5MP Ethernet camera
- Two A2 Compliant Manipulators with 6-axis force-torque sensors at the wrist
- Two G2 Compliant Grippers
- B1 Omni Base with Prismatic Lift and Computation Backpack
Meka M1 Mobile Manipulator vimeo from Meka Robotics on Vimeo.
As we've previously featured, Meka supports integration with ROS on their various robot hardware products. They are looking to take that a step further with the new M1 platform. They will start "pushing deeper on ROS integration", which means integrating the M1 with many higher-level ROS capabilities that the community has built. Users will still be able to take advantage of the great real-time capabilities that their M3 software system provides.
The M1 joins the growing ROS community of mobile manipulation platforms: Care-O-bot 3, PR2, and DARPA ARM robot. We're excited that the users of these various hardware platforms will be able to easily collaborate and push new bleeding-edge capabilities in ROS.
The M1 is inspired by Georgia Tech's Cody, which is also built using Meka components. The M1 will cost $340k for the standard model, but the modular design enables Meka to develop customized solutions as well.
Leave a comment