Robotic arm

In the 1970s, a department for robots was established at SZTAKI, led by Tibor Vámos, the founder and first director of the institute. The department developed its own robotic arm prototype: it is a six-degree-of-freedom robot, each component of which is its own casting, made to an individual design. Its motors are Soviet military developments - at the time, there were no such small, accessible drives. The robot's position feedback is a simple potentiometer. This means that its accuracy today would be exceptionally poor: it can be off by a few centimetres, which is still considered rudimentary compared to the advanced robots of our time. However, for its time, it was a pioneering device, made of aluminium and steel, weighing around 28 kilos. The robot is still manually controlled today.