Some Thoughts on Robotic Arms

The more I think about this, the more I think it would be advantageous to have one or more robotic arms not he robot. When I got to thinking about the arm it occurred to me that perhaps I might want to consider placing the camera on the arm itself. In this way the arm could act independently of what the rest of the robot is doing. I guess in a way this is what the "Hydra" was all about in ancient mythology.The Hydra was a beast that had many heads, each was independent of the other and was supported by the body. In that way it was difficult to conquer by Hercules. In the same way, if the programming is done in an independent fashion, the robotic arms could maneuver independently of each other and therefore become much more difficult to conquer. The problems with doing such a scheme are enormous. It would require a lot more processing power than I probably have available int he power and weight budget that I have available to me. This of course does not mention the cost involved in development time and in parts (servos are not cheap). I would like to determine if this would be a good idea before I commit to buying parts to make a camera mount with multiple degrees of freedom. I note that what is possible with this setup is to have a set of routines programmed which could then be reused by the program as another instantiation. That simplifies the programming somewhat and would give me an edge if we were to decide to have even more arms. Need to think about this one a bit more.