The GummiArm Project: A Replicable and Variable-Stiffness Robot Arm for Experiments on Embodied AI
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robots used in research on Embodied AI often need to physically explore the world, to fail in the process, and to develop from such experiences. Most research robots are unfortunately too stiff to safely absorb impacts, too expensive to repair if broken repeatedly, and are never operated without the red kill-switch prominently displayed. The GummiArm Project was intended to be an open-source "soft" robot arm with human-inspired tendon actuation, sufficient dexterity for simple manipulation tasks, and with an eye on enabling easy replication of robotics experiments. The arm offers variable-stiffness and damped actuation, which lowers the potential for damage, and which enables new research opportunities in Embodied AI. The arm structure is printable on hobby-grade 3D printers for ease of manufacture, exploits stretchable composite tendons for robustness to impacts, and has a repair-cycle of minutes when something does break. The material cost of the arm is less than $6000, while the full set of structural parts, the ones most likely to break, can be printed with less than $20 worth of plastic filament. All this promotes a concurrent approach to the design of "brain" and "body," and can help increase productivity and reproducibility in Embodied AI research. In this work we describe the motivation for, and the development and application of, this 6 year project.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it