Dobot M1 SCARA Arm: Innovation or Old Hat?
I know nothing about robotics. I've been watching videos of new robots for the consumer market. I watched a bunch of crappy Youtubes featuring wobbly arms based on the human skeletal system. It seemed like they couldn't do anything that would be worthwhile, but I still thought they were pretty neat. Then I saw the Dobot M1, which has a vertical pillar sort of thing with two "elbows" that rotate in the horizontal plane. You can use it for 3D printing and all sorts of things that could actually be useful.
I thought the Dobot people were geniuses, and then I Googled around, and I learned that this type of robot is nothing new. It's called "SCARA," and they're in use all over the place.
People are supposedly going to pay a grand or more for Dobot M1 robots, and they seem pretty excited about it.
Here is my question: how is this thing better than buying a used industrial-quality SCARA arm? To an untrained person, it seems like the Dobot people are just copying an old design and making an inexpensive desktop version. Surely there has to be more to it than that.
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Re: Dobot M1 SCARA Arm: Innovation or Old Hat?
Have you priced a new SCARA robot arm lately? If these guys are putting them out for a grand or so, and supporting them, that sounds like a deal to me. Sure, you can find old industrial robots at a steep discount, but figuring out how to make them work for you could be difficult. They're all different, and just the set of connectors and cables will likely cost more than the whole Dobot system.
[FONT=Verdana]Andrew Werby[/FONT]
[URL="http://www.computersculpture.com/"]Website[/URL]
Re: Dobot M1 SCARA Arm: Innovation or Old Hat?
Man, those must be some nice cables.
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