Willow Garage may sell its Velo robot gripper early, if you ask nicely

Willow Garage may sell its Velo 2G robot grippers early, if you ask nicely

Some have called Willow Garage’s health into question lately, but the company may have a minor hit on its hands — if through an unexpected channel. The firm has seen a strong enough response to its Velo robot gripper that it’s mulling an early sale of the device this fall, at an educational price somewhere between $500 and $1,000. Whether or not that happens depends on feedback, however. Willow Garage is both offering notification sign-ups and running a feature survey — if you need a different interface or better performance, now’s the time to speak up. There’s no guarantee of receiving a Velo when the company might ship just 50 to 100 of the advance units, but you won’t get one if you don’t ask, will you?

Filed under:

Comments

Via: IEEE Spectrum

Source: Willow Garage (Google Docs)

The Bike Singularity Is Nigh: The Velo Bike Has An Open Source Brain

664b5b69-7f4d-4350-8c75-242a9cee4a75

The Velo is still a bit of a pie-in-the-sky project but I’d totally be down with it if they made a few in real life. Designed to reduce the “problems” associated with biking – namely collisions and mapping – the bike/microprocessor system is fully electric and connects with your smartphone to perform some very interesting tricks.

First, there’s collision avoidance that offers haptic feedback when you’re about to slam into something. The bike also works with your smartphone for built-in mapping and “drive by wire” control of your brakes and transmission. The creators hope to offer ubiquitous computing built-in for “data sensing, real-time intelligent tracking systems, dynamic routing, and social integration.”

The founder, Jack Al-Kahwati is an former Sikorsky and BAE engineer, which I suspect means that soon he’ll be able to add carbon fiber wings to this thing and make it fly you over traffic.

I saw these guys at the NYC Maker Faire and was really excited to see a svelte electric bike. Little did I know that these things were going to be far cooler than I imagined. The plan is to launch a Kickstarter in the next few months but a prototype is working now and the team is building out more features.

Again, it’s still early to call it, but it’s definitely an ambitious and cool hardware project.

Project Page