DoDAO's Robotics Hardware: Pick the Right Parts, Bring Up the Cell

At DoDAO, we help you pick and integrate the right arm, gripper, sensors, compute, and power for the task. Then we walk the cell through bring-up to a working setup on a real bench. We focus on commercially available, well-supported parts so the system stays maintainable. Here is what we offer under our Robotics Hardware service.

1. Arm Selection

  • What It Does: We help you choose the right collaborative arm for the task, across cobot tiers such as the myCobot 280, Universal Robots cobots, and Franka research arms.
  • How It Helps: The wrong arm wastes money on capabilities you do not need, or fails on a task it was never sized for. Picking the right one first saves both.
  • Example: For a vial-handling lab cell, a 6-axis cobot with a 250 mm reach is enough. A full UR10 would be overkill and would not fit on the bench.

2. Gripper Selection

  • What It Does: We pick the right gripper for the job, including parallel-jaw, suction, or a custom three-finger top-down tool for vial-style tasks.
  • How It Helps: The gripper is what actually touches the work. A poor gripper choice limits everything the arm can do, no matter how good the software is.
  • Example: A standard parallel jaw works fine on most objects, but slim glass vials need a custom three-finger tool that grasps from the top without crushing the body.

3. Sensor Selection

  • What It Does: We pick the right sensors, including RGB-D cameras such as Intel RealSense or ZED, wrist force-torque sensors, joint encoders, and safety scanners.
  • How It Helps: The right sensors give the perception and control stack the data they need, without drowning the compute budget in noise.
  • Example: A wrist RGB-D camera plus an ATI force-torque sensor is enough for most lab tasks. A second overhead camera adds value only for specific bin-picking jobs.

4. Compute and Edge Selection

  • What It Does: We pick the right compute, including NVIDIA Jetson modules and Intel NUCs, and lay out the ROS 2 graph across edge and workstation nodes.
  • How It Helps: A clean compute split keeps perception fast, keeps the safety-critical loop responsive, and keeps the bill of materials reasonable.
  • Example: Wrist-camera perception runs on a Jetson at the arm. Higher-level planning runs on a NUC under the bench. The two talk over a private wired network.

5. Mechanical Mounting and Power

  • What It Does: We design and build mounts, base plates, and power and cable management for the cell.
  • How It Helps: A robot that vibrates on a wobbly mount or trips a circuit at peak draw is unusable. Mechanical and power work is what makes a demo a real product.
  • Example: A bench-top cobot needs a rigid base plate that is bolted, not clamped, to the bench. We design and source that plate as part of the bring-up.

6. Bring-Up to Working Cell

  • What It Does: We bring the cell up from box-open to a working pick-and-place setup, including operator HMI, networking, and safety configuration.
  • How It Helps: Bring-up is where most projects stall. Having a team that has done this many times shortens that stage from months to weeks.
  • Example: From the day the arm and the camera arrive, we plan a two-to-three-week bring-up that ends with a working pick-and-place loop and a documented operator workflow.

Why Choose DoDAO for Robotics Hardware?

Choosing DoDAO means working with a team that has integrated arms, grippers, sensors, and compute into real working cells, not just slide decks. We pick commercially available, well-supported parts so your team can maintain the cell long after we ship it. From the first spec sheet to a running pick-and-place loop, we own the path end-to-end.