Dexter is an open-source, seven-axis, 3D printed, high-precision, low-cost, robot platform
Dexter, I mean the name, comes from human dexterity
We think there's anything a human can do, dexterity wise, is what we want to capture with a robot
If you can hold the tool, we can capture that human dexterity and repeat that
We call it a reconfigurable robot because we can use 3D printing to actually, very quickly, build new end effectors
I'm Kent Gilson, and I'm the founder and inventor and the
robot designer. I'm Todd Enerson
President and one of the cofounders here at Haddington as well. When we first started
we actually used a three millimeter MDF and a laser, but then we moved into a PLA and
ABS with early, you know, cheap 3d printers. We had seven
Yeah, at seven PLA printers, and the maintenance to keep them going
We're probably at 30-35 percent success rate
Yeah, we got our first Markforged Mark Two, the continuous carbon fiber one in October
Literally took about two weeks to actually completely redesign the robot bed with the Markforged printers
We bought a Markforged only for the continuous carbon fiber, for the strength of the stiffness
But we were surprised by how, first of all, how tolerance they are, but also the surfaces is shiny
it's really actually pretty and
And we can sell a final product that is just Markforged finished parts
It allows us to print things that really shouldn't be printed. But because it's strong enough we can do so
On our robots, we have three harmonic drives
And these give us 52 to 1 gear ratio, and we really need that for torque and precision
But these are really hard to get and they're really expensive. And so we came up with a solution using Markforged
we are printing what's called a
Cycloidal drive, we can print really really strong gears and get the same gear ratio out of that
You think the time and money we save by switching to and having the family of Markforged printers is the reliability
I mean, we're getting more production off of one than we got off a seven
I don't know how we'd be able to do this without that Markforged
And that printer, we run the numbers, then there's at no time
Is there a reason for us to actually go injection molding. Not just from material properties
But just the economics of actually having a printer. In fact, we can buy a new printer after we sell a single robot
So we can amortize our capital equipment's  cost over a single robot
That fundamentally changes the financing of a company. Never, you know
kind of go into injection molding for the robots
One of the most exciting things about having 3D printing and Markforged printers
working in a robot automation
You know, role is the ability to very rapidly create fixturing and that includes the custom grippers, you know
You can actually creating the gripper in just you know
20-30 minutes in CAD and have it print out on the Markforged
We can actually take a scan of a particular object
Use that geometry to actually build a gripper that's designed just for that object and then have a custom gripper in a day
And then we're not stuck with that design either and that's what we can continue to iterate
It's fundamentally changed
The nature of our business and the ability for us to exercise our business plan
