Elephant Robotics

Elephant Robotics was founded in 2016 in Shenzhen, a city famous for the fact that within a few kilometers you can buy any electronic component. That is important context: from the start the company built robot arms from cheap, available parts and popular controllers (Raspberry Pi, Jetson, M5Stack) instead of forging its own closed platform. The result is the myCobot family: small desktop arms that fit in a backpack and start up from a laptop. Alongside them the company sells consumer robot pets, metaCat and metaDog, and the Mercury dual-arm humanoid platform. There is no public information on funding rounds, valuation or headcount; the manufacturer does not disclose them, so we give no such figures. Nor do we know the detailed launch dates of individual models. What is known is that the products are widely resold by electronics distributors in Europe, including the German shop welectron.com. That presence in hobbyist and university sales channels says more about the company than press releases: this is a manufacturer that wins on availability and price, not on industrial repeatability. For a reader just starting out in robotics, such a history is an advantage: the barrier to entry is low, and the maker community helps where the documentation ends.

The range has four arms, all 6-axis and electric. myCobot 280 is the smallest: 250 g payload, priced from about 649 USD, for learning programming and light pick-and-place tasks. At the same level is myCobot 280 in the version with an M5Stack controller for 599 USD, the classic arm for Python and ROS courses. One step up is myCobot 320: 3.36 kg weight, 1 kg payload, about 4,000 USD, although that figure dates from 2022 and needs updating. The largest is myCobot Pro 600: 8.8 kg, 2 kg payload, from 8,799 USD, positioned as the company's first step toward light industrial automation; its full specification is unconfirmed. Anyone starting from scratch will find comparison frameworks in educational robots and “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities”. How inexpensive collaborative arms compare with true cobots is shown in “What Is a Cobot and How Does It Differ from an Industrial Robot”, and school applications in schools and universities. What all four arms have in common is low weight and work with popular controllers, which lets you connect them to your own code without special manufacturer software. They differ mainly in payload, from 250 g to 2 kg, and so in their applications.

Elephant Robotics plays in the segment of light educational and prototyping arms, where its main rival is Dobot with a similar desktop-arm philosophy. A bit higher, in the class of true industrial cobots, stand Universal Robots and Doosan Robotics; Elephant Robotics does not fully enter there yet, although the myCobot Pro 600 tries to open the door. Compared with Dobot, the company leans harder on open hardware architecture and the maker community than on industrial scale. We have no data on funding or corporate customers, so we judge its market position by its presence in shops: the products are sold by many distributors in Europe. We do not know the number of units sold. Openness to popular controllers is a trait that wins in education over closed systems, but in industry it can be a drawback: collaborative-safety certifications are missing, which we cover in “Robot Safety Standards”. For comparison: a 250 g payload is enough for a pen or a light cube, not for an industrial tool.

According to available information, the myCobot 280 is available in Poland through the shop deltarobots.com. We know of no official manufacturer representative in Poland; in Europe the arms are sold by, among others, Germany's welectron.com. We have no documented Polish industrial deployments or specific universities using myCobots, so we name none. The natural home for these arms is school workshops and robotics clubs, which we cover in “How to Start Learning Robotics in Poland”. A price of 649 USD is roughly the cost of a few university textbooks, which makes the arm a realistic purchase for a high school.

Elephant Robotics is a sensible choice for learning: cheap arms, open controllers, a large community. The myCobot 280 costs less than a mid-range phone and is enough for a programming course. Do not buy it for production that requires repeatability: a 250 g payload says it all. Recommendation: for schools and hobbyists yes, for factories no. Before buying, check the current price, because the value for the myCobot 320 dates from 2022.