The Dobot robotic arm family is versatile, cost-efficient educational robots that are fully programmable and offer students of all ages (from elementary to college level) a hands-on experience with Industry 4.0 and automation.
Interview with Elad Inbar of RobotLAB and Julie from DOBOT
Elad: Hello everyone and welcome to our channel again. I'm Elad Inbar the CEO from RobotLAB, and today I'm here with Julie from Dobot and she's joining us from China. And today we are going to talk about all the different great robotics products that they have and that we represent here in the West. Julie, thank you for joining us. And thank you for your time.
Julie: Hi Elad, hi everyone. Thanks. This is Julie from Dobot, thanks for providing this opportunity for us to so our products to the customers in the United States.
Elad: Yeah. Thank you. Before we jump into the into the, like the different products and everything, can you tell us a little bit more about Dobot, the vision of the company and what you're looking at?
Julie: Yes. of course. Let's start off with our company background. It's five years old and focuses on aero robotics with great success on Kickstarter. Driven by the success on Kickstarter, our company, Dubot was it established since 2015 and for the past five years, our company has been growing rapidly from five engineers to 300 employees. And our product line also expanded from one single robotton to a series of robotons and we sell to the global market. So, I'd like to show you our showroom so you can see our product line.
Elad: Sure.
Julie: This is our industrial line robots. But today we will not focus on these industrial products. Our focus will be the educational line products today.
Elad: So, in the educational line we have the magician with the different accessories, we have the Magician Lite.
Julie: Yes. The Magician Lite and also M1.
Elad: And the M1?.
Julie: Yes. So we have sold alot of these educational robots to the global market. Actually, tens of thousands of schools and universities. We didn't expect that our company would be growing into an enterprise that is helping students and changing the way of teaching learning and really contributing to student's future career.
Elad: Yeah. From our side we see great demand, especially from the education from the you know, both K-12 and higher education according to universities, because this robot bring the great experience that big robots can bring at the fraction of the cost. So, the cost efficiency here is unprecedented. I mean, it never happened before. This is why we and we see our customers really love it because, you know, instead of buying a cooker robot for $80,000, they can buy to Dobot for a few hundreds and practically do the same. And this is a great value for especially education Institute.
Julie: Yes. Our product is much more affordable for schools and for, for students. And the nowadays students have facing with a lot of more challenges compared to the students in our traditional schools, because we spoke about, so there's a shortage of skilled workers in the manufacturing field. Our goal is helping students to apply the knowledge that tomorrow's world needs. Like engineering robotics and automation industry 4.0. We're proud to see that we could do something in the education evolution development.
Elad: Yeah, absolutely. And I heard that you have some demos for us that you want to show us. The robots I see here the new Magician Light.
Julie: Yes. How about we start with our most popular products that's the magician because it is our first generation and we have sold a lot to schools. Speaking about the magician, we can see the magician have a lot of the factors like pen holder, a suction cup, 3D printing kit, and a lazing engraving kit. We saw this one is a penholder where it can do writing and drawing. This is a suction cup kit section and this is a plain three D printing kits. And this one is laser engraving kit., it is working now.
Elad: Yup. You can see the laser over there.
Julie: Here, here's a demo. We can see this coming about this. The way I'm about to is almost the popular access work. We sold the a lot to schools. So we should magician combined with the belts, it can work as a mini production line.
Elad: So yeah, so the students program the robots to move objects to identify the colours.
Julie: Yes. That's different colors and blocks and the colour I'm abouts to moves the blocks here, there's a color sensor and it recognize the color, which is green. And the magician will go to the back of the green area.
Elad: And the students program, all of that. They do they need any special skills to program this? What are they using in order to programming?
Julie: The programming interface is Blockly. It's very easy.
Elad: Blockly
Julie: Yeah. Blockly this is a software developed by our software engineers. It's very simple for learners; If they just started learning coding.
Elad: Yeah. I believe the robot support other programming languages as well.
Julie: Yes, like Python and C++. Last what other almost all the languages.
Elad: So I heard you have other demos with other robots.
Julie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the Magician Lite, our new product. We have a lot of customers waiting for this product from last year and this year finally it is available.
Elad: Got you. Well, why didn't you produce the Magician Light?
Julie: Because but yeah, we have magician and from magician we mainly sell to a higher education markets and like a high schools, technical schools, and the universities. But students in middle school, even primary school they still have to learn coding and steam education. All of these courses are required or some educational robots that we produce the Magician Lite for primary school and middle school students. For lower grade student, for Magician Litethe payload is lower than the Magician. It's more affordable for schools, even cheaper than the Magician and to define that the Magician Lite is very cute. I guess kids would love this design.
Elad: Yeah, again, less cables to connect for different attachments. It's more streamlined.
Julie: And let's see. There are some hand detectors for Magician; this is the suction cup and there's a camera. You can see here is a circuit breaker for magician lights. Magician Light only have three hand detectors; the circuit breaker, suction cup, and pen holder. And we will mainly focus on artificial intelligence education at this product because you will see there is a camera here, the camera and that can be used for vision control. And also Magician Lite can be controlled by voice that's why say it is a good tool for artificial intelligence education.
Elad: I see. And the students does that including the voice command? They programmed everything?
Julie: Yes. And, and the programming to be done on the scratch software. This is a scratch software. And that the difference with magician and not the different big differences, Magician Lite have a power box, and there's a magic box in the power box. And this magic box can be used for controlling your links used by Magician. Yeah. This course cane become active with certain development tools like Arduino Ford.
Elad: So this is like a mini computer that's connected to the robotic arm.
Juie: Yes. If the customer uses this magic box, they don't have to use a computer or a software.
Elad: So we take our software and we load it on this magic box?
Julie: Yes. We load that program to the box. And then your computer.
Elad: I got you. And the extension for it? We can add any other hardware or Arduino board, or whatnot?
Julie: Yes.
Elad: Great. Can we see it doing something?
Julie: Yeah. Can we show this demo? This is a software and that's a color sensor. Red ones will go to this box and the white ones will go here.
Elad: So is this part of the package, can school by this demonstration; The carrots and the container and all of that?
Julie: The carrots are not included in the package. Magicbox and soft breaker are included in the package?
Elad: Can schools buy the kits with the carrots as well or you don't tell them?
Julie: We don't sell these.
Elad: I'm sure we can find a resource.
Julie: And there's another demo, show you how the camera works. A computer is telling me what's the camera and the camera recognize that this is a lady and Dobot Magician Lite will pick one, pink one. If the camera recognizes that it's a gentleman it will pick one the blue one as a gift.
Julie: Yeah,
Elad: I got your shot. So the camera sees you now. Okay, great. And again, all of this code with a vision recognition and the voice command, everything is done using Scratch?
Julie: Yes. All using Scratch. We use scratch more frequently than the Turbo Studio
Elad: I see, and which languages it supports?
Julie: Oh both of Chinese and English. Yeah. We are adding other languages like Spanish and French, but I might have to wait two or three more months.
Elad: Gotcha. That's great.
Julie: Okay. Can we move to m1.
Elad: Okay. We have the M1 as well, which is a more robust, more a higher end kind of, can you talk about the M1 for example?.
Julie: Oh sure. For M1, it's a more higher more advanced higher education like universities and labs like a chemical or biology labs. There are manufacturers also purchase or real production. Real manufacturing, like there are some factors like, like a tool topic purchase them or the manufacturing line. And for education markets, students that can use M1 to learn how robots work in real manufacturing environments. And, and for M1 we have reflex levels and effectors. The basic kit is the Gripper and the suction capital must disclose factors, would you choose these and the effectors? And we also have kits with the 3D printing kit and the laser engraving kit or makers and the biggest kit for secular development. But most of the users will choose the gripper and a suction cap.
Elad: Yeah. And in this demo I see that we're using the vision kit and the conveyor belt.
Julie: Yes. These blocks represents different types of garbage or waste. And we've put these blocks into this place and then the command belts and moves a black pant here to here. And the vision kit will recognize the type of the waste and one keep up the waste and the put it to different places like recycle waste to all household food waste. There are four types and as students should, I guess students might say it's meaningful for students.
Elad: Yeah. Yeah. I understand the M1 can be mobile as well, right?
Julie: Yes. If we connect M1 with a edgy web system, or edgy web platform, it can move and like students not learn smart warehousing and to use robots with the AGV platform to carry heavy items.
Elad: Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about the AGB work? What that was sense or does he care what type of battery?
Julie: The AGV platform is based on our system and that the basic function AGV system is slam navigation.
Elad: So we can program the AGV itself separately; the M1. And all of the is a different procedure?
Julie: Yes. We can program individually. The AGV platform supports C ++ and Python.
Elad: Okay. Yes. And also Ras.
Julie: Okay. Ras yes. This is the the software for AGV system.
Elad: Yeah. And I see the doctor map that it creates from the sensors.
Julie: Yes.
Elad: And how long the battery lasts?
Julie: Four to five hours.
Elad: Four to five hours and does it charge itself or someone has to charge it?
Julie: Oh yeah. It can charge automatically.
Elad: Great.
Julie: This is actually chatting now. We can see that M1 is picking up a bottle of water.
Elad: Great. And then it goes to delivery. That's awesome.And if someone walks infront of the robot the robot can detect it and stop bumping into people.
Julie: It will stop. Yeah.
Elad: Great. That's great. That's awesome. Yeah, this is a great tool for universities. Both the mobility and the durability in order to perform both research and no robotics education.
Julie: Yeah. I picked up this the water and M1 will go back and pick up another one.
Elad: And get another one. Oh, that's great.
Julie: Get another one. Yeah.
Elad: That's great. So thank you for, thank you for the demos. This, this was really great. I really appreciate that. That I'm sure our viewers will appreciate it as well. For the future, what's coming up for Dobot? You have new products or new software or where is it going from here? This is great, but always people ask us what's coming up.
Julie: Our future is, we'll continuously produce educational robots and the access was for our customers and that we we plan to build to an educational ecosystem for our customers, like combine our robots and the access was with the curiculum software and the AI classes, robotic competition, all these together to better serve the education market.
Elad: Yeah.
Julie: And and we planning on upgrading the Mac system and that attending more global robot project education and competition, and that writing new curriculum for Dobot products could be equipped to every corner of the world and that we can continuously provide real affordable robots for our global customers.
Elad: Yes. Great. That's great. I appreciate that. And here I am like right here, I have a, you know, the M1 in our AI lab so we are already there promoting that and we have hundreds of schools already using it and I know that it's doable and it's working. And with the curriculum, it's a great tool in the hands of educators.
Julie: Yeah, I saw that's your AI lab is very impressive and it looks great. Thank you.
Elad: So thank you very much, Julie. I appreciate your time and everyone, if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us. So we would love to give you a demonstration and answer any of your questions.
Elad: And thank you very much.
Julie: Thank you Elab. Bye.
