If Fraunhofer IPA wanted to dumb down their product to the point it was useless and nobody wanted it, I'm sure they could take off the arms and program it to meander about. Then you'd have a gosy junkbot.
Holey Moley - $4135 parts cost for a 7 DOF robot arm!
Seems like you missed the results of your reference pape.
In this paper, we present a robotic arm with similar performance on many measures to high-end research robotic arms but at a drastically lower single-unit parts cost of $4135.
What ever happened to the spencer/iFoo joint arm development?