Dobot M1 end effectors include suction cup, pen holder, laser, gripper and 3D printing. Just change the end effectors, thus achieving applications like pick & place, drawing & writing, laser engraving, gray engraving, and 3D printing.
Yes, you can. We will publish the CAD file of M1’s end-effector interface and you can design your customized holder to install your own end-effector.

Sure. Dobot M1 is designed as a platform that people can do great things with it. Besides the applications and software we provide, user can develop their own applications with our SDK. API(Application Program Interface), communication data protocol, and some basic demos are provided freely to our developers. Therefore you can easily develop your application with the your familiar programing language such as Python, Java, C++, C# and etc. The open protocol provides the fundamental method to communicate with Dobot M1, which gives you the power of developing applications with other devices like PLC, smart phone, or other control system.

Dobot M1 provide some basic visual functions, such as camera calibration, obtaining image, edge detection, image segmentation and coordination extraction. With the provided function, you can implement a basic vision based Pick & Place application for some target object. And we will also provide the API of the mentioned functions for you to have quick setup and develop much more advanced vision applications.

As a group of robot engineers, we love to see professional robot once defined as industrial manufacturing equipment can be applied in more scenarios, to see robot comes into our life and help people with their creation and improving work efficiency. To make it acceptable, it has to be affordable. The cost is considered from the beginning of our design. To maintain its performance, we hold professional standard for key components such as motor, reducer. And we also managed to simplify the design which also keeps the whole system clean and robust. Removing the non-essential components also helps a lot, e.g. replacing the teaching panel with a user-friendly APP.

With crowd founding, we will be able to sell a lot units(comparing traditional industrial robot) in a short period, which also gives us advantage in the manufacturing stage. Therefore we need your help, more people join us, lower the cost we can achieve.

A simple answer would be as far as the length of the slide rail.
With the slide rail, the M1 can be set free from its fixed mounting location and become moveable. In which case the M1 can pick and place object form one end to another end of the rail, draw large picture, engraving in bigger range, printing long object(longer than most the 3D printers we can find from the market). The slide rail does extend the capabilities in a great deal. The slide rail we provide is 1.2 M long, and you can replace it with a longer one.