Haddington Dynamics showed off at MakerCon a new, under-$2,000, 5-axis robot arm kit called the Dexter. The arm will be able to lift up 1kg over a reach radius of 670mm (about 26″) with extremely high precision, the company said.
The kit’s components are carbon fiber–imbued plastic, which the company said makes for a durable, strong construction that is also easy to upgrade or repair.
The Dexter arm is trainable. It can be put into a mode where motors are unpowered and a user moves the arm from one position to the next, while the arm learns. And as with industrial robots, you can put different end effectors on the device. The company mentioned that the Dexter could have a gripper, a pick-and-place nozzle, a 3D print extruder, or a spindle to make it into a 3D CNC machine.
We’re looking forward to testing this arm as a fabrication tool. For complex 3D tasks, a 3D arm can’t be beat, even though gantry platforms for 3D fabricators are traditionally more stable and capable of higher precision.
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