Dobot: Robotic Arm for Everyone, Arduino & Open Source

Designed for DESKTOP. Arduino-powered, 4-axis parallel-mechanism robot arm with High Quality. Bring industrial robot to every home!

About this project

We are six engineers who built a 4-axis high accuracy, high repeat precision, stepper motor, Arduino-based, desktop robotic arm called Dobot.

Imagine when your new born baby says "flower" the first time in his/her life, and it gets sent to a robotic arm, automatically the word transforms to the character 龙 (dragon, see video) in Chinese calligraphy on a piece of paper, or a 3D printed plastic flower, or be typed on a mobile phone that sends to your parents. it becomes tangible, sharable, and connected to one of the most precious moments in your life. 

At Dobot, we believe there are beautiful and magical things that just cannot be explored, captured, and replicated by ourselves. That’s why the ultrasmart scientists and engineers invented space ships, and that's why we created Dobot: to bring industrial robot to life.

As makers, we love tools. Great tools are always simple, beautiful and intuitive, like the hammer and pen. They work in our ways, not the other way around.

Dobot is versatile and designed for everyone. It can draw, write, text, move, grab things following your orders. It liberates your arms from doing repetitive tasks. For more advanced makers, Dobot has great potential to be an essential part of your own project.

Who loves Dobot?

Even the Co-founder of Arduino wants to buy one! The Dobot team was extremely flattered when running into the Massimo Banzi at the 2015 Shenzhen Maker Faire and hearing he say he liked it and wanted to buy one! We know there are much to be done to make our dream come true, but we were really grateful for such an encouragement from a hardcore maker like him.

"I'm lucky to get the chance to see lots of hardware projects, but Dobot's blend of high production value, precision and openness has me really excited!" —— Jeremy Gordon, Former Vice President @Twitter

Do you want to challenge? (DO NOT IMITATE ALONE)

Help us to share Dobot

Now we get 1900+ likes on Facebook Page and 20,000+ views on Instructables.

Promote our campaign on social networks, you will have the chance to win a Dobot Promotion Code, saving up to 20~100 US Dollars.

              

Dobot: Learn with The Robot

Learn how to write Chinese characters or words for children. With its high accuracy power and open source software platform, you and your children can learn the beauty of calligraphy and basic engineering at the same time.

Dobot: Play with the Robot

It is fun! Dobot can help you feed and tickle your pets, play interactive games with friends, even play board games against the robot.

Dobot Brings Industrial Precision and Power to Your Life.

Dobot’s high precision is the highlight. We spent much of our energy to optimize its technology. With such a low cost, we have managed to maintain the industrial precision level. When performing repetitive actions, the error in precision is as small as 0.2mm, empowering you to do delicate work without losing the precision. See below for more detailed info on specs. 

Dobot is super easy to control, and can be controlled your own way. 

Easy usability comes first during the design of Dobot. We have given a lot of thought on users without technical backgrounds, and how to help them better control robotic arms. In order to make as young as five years old kids able to use Dobot in ease, we have done extensive research and designed multiple ways for control, including PC, mobile app, EEG, voice, vision, gesture and mind, whichever suits your purpose the best.

Dobot works quietly.

We have also considered on where the users will be using it, and tired out best to make the noise level as low as possible. By using customized stepper motor, we are able to minimize noise level, making Dobot much quieter than low-cost servo robotic arms and more household-friendly. 

Here’s a comparison video with servo based robotic arms.

Dobot is Open.

Dobot will be open sourced after the Kickstarter campaign. As a group of devoted open source fans, we believe open source makes the world better by levering the power of collective minds. Yet to help you understand better of what we do, we are working around the clock on some of the code that need more notations and explanations. But we make our promise here that after the Kickstarter campaign, we will upload the code. Keep in touch, there are more surprises to come. 

Dobot supports three OpenSource Firmware for special application and developer.

Dobot: Even More Exciting For Makers! 

Dobot supports three OpenSource Firmware for special applications and developers with different programming preferences. 

1. Complete developed by Dobot team Easy for developers familiar with Industrial robots 

 2. Base on grbl (https://github.com/grbl/grbl) Easy for developers familiar with open source CNC machine 

3. Base on Marlin (https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin) Easy for developers familiar with RepRap compatiable 3D printer. 

Also we provide communication interface for OpenCV (http://opencv.org/) to add vision to Dobot.

Dobot is a maker team and we create what's best for makers. We use Arduino as the controller. Although when tackling some critical problems, we found this might not be the perfect solution, after continuous improvements, we believe this could equip superb functionality with Dobot. We also encourage everyone to get familiar with Arduino. We love Arduino! 

Processing is the widely-applauded data visualization and programming platform for beginners. Simply drag and click, you can program Dobot at your will on its user-friendly interface. 

Scratch is also a briiliant visual programming language that's more widely used by children, artists and makers. It helps them to control and program all types of electronic devices and interactive products. Dobot's control is based on the easy-for-understanding serial communication protocol whose working principles are all open-sourced. If we are successfully funded on Kickstarter, we will add more manpower in developing control extensions based on Scratch, and believe this will make operating Dobot applications easier for children, enabling them to bring their ideas to life. 

What can you do with Dobot?

Can Dobot use a mobile phone to turn off the lights? Can Dobot fetch an apple in a folder by brain (EEG) control? Of course! We are firm believers in furthering the possibilities of Dobot robotic arm! Now it’s your turn to make your magic of Dobot happen.

Accurate handling

ssemble Iron Man by a robot arm.

Combined with 3D printing

PTZ camera

Mobile Handling

Maybe you could try assemble a Iron Man

Anything else Dobot can do?

Dobot provides a total of 7 controlling methods, including mouse, mobile APP, vision, EEG, voice, leap motion and gestures.

Mouse Control

This is designed for PC users. A Windows application to realize the various functions of Mouse Control have been developed to support writing, painting, teaching and playback.

Leap Motion Control

You can use PC software control the robot by Leap Motion 3D Controller. The Leap Motion is an inexpensive widely-available commercial gesture controller. Through adjusting motion parameters, more motion functions could be developed and we leave the possibilities to you to create.

Vison Control

We have made a vision positioning software based on OpenCV to achieve vision pick and place. If you are familiar with machine vision, you can expand Dobot's vision to "see" more and serve you better.

Voice Control

We have developed a mobile APP for Voice Control using Bluetooth to communicate with Arduino. It supports voice identification to receive instructions on Dobot to achieve more accurate control on moving distance and angle. You could explore more creation room on this by programming different codes.  

EEG Control

Our own Arduino Library has been specially set up to support EEG Control. By our code library and examples, you can use EEG data to trigger a series of movements or control the speed of movement.

Gesture Control

Through Arduino Library, you can use your arm to initiate the gesture Control, the gesture sensor provides rotation data of arm and hand, and based on our methods you may make it more fast and accurate!

Arduino Library

We have included diversified written motion functions for user to make their own Dobot code community. We’ve included forward and inverse solution, point to point, line, jump Path Planning, everything is open source, and you can make it better. These code examples have very similar principles to industrial robot developing and they are very useful for one who wants to understand how an industrial robot works.  In our code, we provide the limit and working range protection, various joint and coordinate commands, combine these functions and you are the magician.

Tech. Spec.

Electronic Parts

Our initial thought was to design a shield for the Arduino (Mega2560) for connecting mega2560 and 3 stepper driver boards and also to contain a current amplifying module to drive the vacuum pump and the solenoid valve. Meanwhile, it can manage driving 2 servos with 3 steppers. Based on that, we modified the design to accommodate more users, thus another shield of Arduino was born to satisfy all of the above functions. This eliminates the constitute of stepper driver boards and reconsiders the measures for overcurrent protection and heat dissipation. Our core competency is to employ fewer wires with a better outlook ensured.

How to use? -- For Makers

We will update later.

Rewards

The Quality

How Dobot is made and how we made its incredible precision level possible. 

The mechanical structure entirely employed CNC cutting technology. For key parts the machinery accuracy has reached 0.02mm. Joint connections adopted high accuracy axes coupled with chrome alloy interference lit, ensuring structural stability and accuracy. On the motor side, Dobot designed the high accuracy speed reducer motor, providing consistent motor power for the robot arm. On the material side, Dobot was made of high strength aluminium alloy and processed by anodic oxidation treatment,  to ensure the sleekness and strength of the surface. 

For software, we have done a great deal of optimization. The software supports speed look-ahead small line blocks interpolation algorithm, able to fit any type of curve and ensure processing efficiency. Moreover, with the Three Axes Linkage Method fine interpolation, you can control the trajectory of the end effector of the Dobot accurately, empowering it with complex curvilinear motions. 

 How things going?

Background

Robot arms have a wide range of applications in industry, for assembling Iron Man, cars, precision surgery and many others, but because of the huge price tag and difficulties in operation, these applications seem very far away from our lives. But robot arms are so charming that they have been attracting players to develop a variety of desktop robot arms.

However, the current desktop robot arms available are mainly simple steering structures. In the exploration of desktop robot arm applications, precision above 10mm has not yet been met. We tried to manufacture a high-precision, easy to control, low-cost robot arm to meet the needs of engineers, machinists and hobbyists everywhere, which is how Dobot was born. We have found that Dobot has more skills and constantly surprises us, like a magician on the desktop!

Why Kickstarter

We have spent years developing our core technologies. We now need an active passionate community to provide us feedback. With your support we can hire additional help and scale our production capabilities. Thank you for taking the time to learn about our mission to enable seamless design and manufacturing.

Feel free to write to us what do you think about Dobot and what do you want us to add to make it better for you! 

Who Is Creating Dobot? 

Dobot is created by the Dobot team. We are committed to creating a desktop and family-mode industrial robot to control so that everyone can have a desktop assistant and family assistant, which is easy to assemble and control, empowered by high precision.

As a group of six industrial robot engineer, we love robot design and we are hoping to satisfy the needs of the people for the desktop manipulator with the lowest cost and simplest control method. We firmly believe that multiple cooperative robots or even a production assembly line will appear on your desktop in the future as we launch a series of new models.

Dobot is affordable.

We wanted to make sure Dobot is accessible to everyone. Through immense effort and countless negotiations with suppliers, we were able to get better deals without compromising the quality and reliability. That’s how we made the price so affordable so more users could use it. We are at our beginning stage and would like to invite you to help promote Dobot so more people passionate about making could know about us. We will offer discounts and refunds to show our appreciation for your support.

To do so, after you purchase Dobot, simply fill out the Dobot Promotion Code (which will be included in the package) and Paypal account information, and we will return 20~100 U.S. Dollars to your account. You can also choose gifts with equal value, and we will ship it to you along with the package.

How to get the Dobot Promition Code?

If you repost or comment our post on Facebook Page/Group, we will randomly select the users to whom we will give the Dobot Promotion Code.

You can also get in touch with reviewers and community influencers, they will be distributing Dobot Promotion Codes to lucky fans and devoted users as well. Good luck!

Keep posted with the Update on the promotion information.