$26 Million Robot Arm: Real 3D Printed Products

Discover the remarkable success of Haddington Dynamics and their robot arm, Dexter, which went from a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign to a $26 million venture in just three years, thanks to the power of mass production 3D printing. By partnering with Slant 3D to produce large batches of robot arm pieces, leveraging the flexibility and complex geometries of 3D printing, Haddington Dynamics was able to achieve rapid growth. This approach allowed them to deliver products on time, and demonstrate the benefits of 3D printing for mass production and high-volume manufacturing.

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#3dprinting #additivemanufacturing #3dprintfarm #3dprintedproducts

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About Slant 3D

🏭 High-Volume 3D Printing: Scalability Meets Flexibility
Slant 3D's Large-Scale 3D Print Farms utilize 1000's of FDM 3D printers working 24/7 to offer limitless scalability and unparalleled flexibility. Whether it's 100 or 100,000 parts, our system can handle it reliably, while still allowing for real-time design updates, ensuring products evolve with the times. This adaptability is key in today's fast-paced world.

🌿 Sustainable Manufacturing: Eco-Friendly Efficiency
Embrace a system that drastically reduces carbon emissions by eliminating carbon-intensive steps in the supply chain, such as global shipping and warehousing. Our approach minimizes this footprint, offering a more sustainable manufacturing option.

⚙️ Digital Warehouses: Parts On-Demand
Think of print farms as a "Digital Warehouse", meaning we can store your parts digitally on a server rather than physically on a shelf. parts are available on-demand, reducing the need for extensive physical inventory.

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[wizardnotknown]

Bruh can't let his head be still for one sentence.

[fail_fast]

I'm one of the engineers working on new products at Haddington. It's hard to understate how critical 3D printing was for our product development and our business strategy. We are still very much in-tune with our maker roots since the acquisition. To Ocado's cresit, they've done their utmost to give us both the freedom and support to continue developing products how we best see fit. We've been able to accomplish some amazing things in these last few years and I can't wait to be able to share what we've been working on. I think the maker community is going to love it.

Thanks for the shoutout, awesome video! I'm going to share this with the rest of my team.

[kristenl]

I personally think molds are superior to 3D print when quantity is concerned, and all models are refined and free from operational defects of the component. Bottom line 3D printing is another form of manufacturing which doesn't render others form obsolete rather used in combination with others can make for vastly better products in the end. A 3D printers strength is in prototyping and cost reduction, where as casting and molding has a speed and part strength advantage. Now if you'll excuse me my Ender 3 just finished a phone stand I've been working on. 😊

[botirlasorin]

The amount of your head movements is out of this world

[dollarbutt]

Head movements are very distracting. Suggest dialing it back.

[egeatilla]

Hope this is not rude but I'd like to give a small criticism: you have very expressive head movements which are quite distracting.

[mateuslira]

No 3d print beats the overall quality of something made on molding

[akira]

Really really good video, keep going like this ! I didn't know that such a good project existed. Thank you a lot for the content !

[b_eberle]

Very cool to see that 3D printing is used for product that have a big number of units. I also created a product with my stair climbing vacuum robot. But there are some things to do until I can bring it Ingo mass production 😢

[tomfoolery]

How do you deal with size inaccuracies due to shrinkage and other factors? It's something I've noticed as a big problem trying to make my own parts, and at least for me it kinda limits my uses to prototype parts where I can alter them to make it fit if needed

[defyslowmotion]

I think the issue with large scale 3D printing is the marketing. 3D printing has been marketed for so long as a hobby/toy maker that people don’t see it as a viable alternative. Mold making and the traditional manufacturing process seems like the the way the “big boy real companies do it”. In my mind it’s similar to when you sell a product with a cheap price and customers thing it’s not going to be good. But if you take the same product and raise the price it sell really well. The big guys use a mold that costs 50k but you’re telling me I can do it on a machine that costs $2000. It doesn’t seem real. 3D printing has a perception problem that it needs to get over.

[DPrinterAcademy]

I'm sure you've gone over this a million times before, but for order sizes around 5, 000-10, 000 would it be cheaper to utilize Slant3D's mega farm rather than injection molding?

[santiagoricoy]

Wow! Thank you! I've been staring at this arm in my laboratory for a while. No one told me the story behind it. Might take a minute to mess with it now.

[bradkoerner]

Great example of 3D printing accelerating product development>>product launch, which is not often discussed. Lots of focus goes on design modelling/prototyping, lots of focus is misplaced on "mass customization", but I saw through my work there is incredible value in accelerating the development/engineering/DFM process.

[TheSupertecnology]

It is truly amazing what additive manufacturing allows when it comes to a production line and overall supply chain.

[HaloWolf]

Dexter was a Kickstarter started to end robotic arm scarcity. It successfully raised $108, 885. The people who funded this startup wanted this company to provide a service to the general public of providing robot arms to consumers. Haddington or Ocado doesn't provide any 3D printed arms to the public currently, and I doubt they ever will.

So, this company stole money from people. And not only did they steal money, but they also didn't put anything in the contract to continue production to serve to the public, once Ocado claimed their buisness.

This video shouldn't be celebrated as a postive thing, because there is nothing positive about building a 27 million company, and running.

[MSM]

These robots are just good enough to work at no further then a grocery store.

[alvaroampudia]

do you have a problem with your neck or head??? why does it move like that???

[davidmalawey]

To answer your question at 5:40, there are many reasons. I'll name two:

1) Getting support from investors & business partners as you try to explain this model - it's very hard with limited case studies to back it up. Investors don't have trust in nontraditional manufacturing, so it is hard to find one who understands. As we look for support, we need more stories like this to help solve that problem. I've shared Prusa's Road to 10, 000 printers video many times to help explain the concept.

2) There's a very limited number of engineers who have a Design-for-Additive experience, which is the difference between 3D printing a crummy toy and 3D printing a real product. The brilliant mechanical engineers get hired away by big companies, with great salaries. Really average mechanical engineers do not have experience or knowledge to successfully design for printing, since these methods are not well addressed in college curriculum. So, it's a very small population of folks who are both capable of doing the design and not taken by big companies. Once they arrive in the big company, they are tasked with much larger scale manufacturing tasks so they often become more brilliant at traditional methods, and the 3D printing or Design-for-3d printing experience is often outsourced. This concentrates the design experience in the niche where folks are actually building print farms. The biggest print farms once again are operated by big companies which probably have several legal barriers to the engineers gaining experience, leaving the company, and making a startup which leverages that experience in a novel product.

[jaqen_hgar]

Why are you making such weird grimaces, and head movements all the time?