New Linux based mobile manipulation robots coming soon!
Fetch Robotics is a start-up launched by former Unbounded Robotics executives with US$ 3 million in funding. It aims to ship a ROS-on-Linux (robot operating system) mobile manipulation robot in the second quarter of 2015.
The US$ 3 million Series A funding is from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and Shasta Ventures, along with contributions from the development team at Unbounded Robotics. The start-up will ship two mobile manipulation robots for the logistics and light industrial markets, as announced by the company. Unbounded Robotics successfully attracted funding when it announced its plans to use Linux and an ROS-based UBR-1 mobile manipulation robot in October 2013. The one-armed robot was sold for a surprisingly low price, around US$ 35,000 to US$ 50,000. But post April 2014, when pre-orders started, little was heard from Unbounded Robotics. By August, the company was closed. UBR1 never shipped. Unbounded Robotics CEO Melanie Wise is the new CEO at Fetch Robotics and other staffers from Unbounded have also joined the new venture. In an email statement to LinuxGizmos, Wise has confirmed that the new robots will run on Linux. The company is expected to showcase the robots at IEEE Robotics & Automation Society which will be held between May 26 and May 30 this year, in Seattle in the US. The company is busy with its hiring process now, and the headcount of employees is expected to double in six months.
Dan Kara, practice director, robotics, at ABI Research said that mobile manipulation is one of the hottest categories in robotics these days. It solves robot navigation problems with OpenCV vision technology which will be integrated into the ROS, which is maintained by the Open Source Robotics Foundation. One reason why mobile manipulation is such a hot trend is the growth in retail logistics, caused by the boom in e-commerce. Most of the ROS projects run on Linux. Other hot robot categories which run on Linux can be spotted in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market.