The telescoping arm is cute, and provides benefits for reaching into constrained spaces like a washing machine, but in the first clones it would likely be replaced with the standard "cylindrical" (e.g. industrial robot style) arm.
Hard to imagine that they could have gotten a patent on "robot arm on Segway". The elevator part though?
A conventional arm? Oh no thank you. Heavier, need a motor out on the elbow joint with another expensive low-backlash gearbox, mast has to be heavier to support the off-axis torque loads, grasp trajectories have another DOF or two. Skip that, please. And it's not like conventional arms are even cheap! If you could buy a decent 1.5 kilo payload arm for less than $5k, you'd have a whole different argument.
From the way the telescoping arm moves, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's driven by a flex-tape linear actuator. Pretty cheap, lets you put the heavy motor right next to the mast, no precision bearings, backlash not so much a problem.
The whole package really is a great design, I'm a big fan. You can tell Edsinger has been using robots out in the real world, with regular people beating them up.
