ActivMedia Robotics - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

ActivMedia Robotics, former name of MobileRobots Inc, is a company in Amherst

Amherst, New Hampshire

Amherst is a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 11,201 at the 2010 census. Amherst is home to Ponemah Bog Wildlife Sanctuary, Hodgman State Forest, the Joe English Reservation and Baboosic Lake....

, New Hampshire

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

that designs and manufactures autonomous robot

Autonomous robot

Autonomous robots are robots that can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. Many kinds of robots have some degree of autonomy. Different robots can be autonomous in different ways...

s, commercial service robot

Service robot

Service robots assist human beings, typically by performing a job that is dirty, dull, distant, dangerous or repetitive, including household chores. They typically are autonomous and/or operated by a build in control system, with manual override options....

s, robot software

Robot software

Robot software is the coded commands that tell a mechanical device what tasks to perform and control its actions. Robot software is used to perform tasks and automate tasks to be performed. Programming robots is a non-trivial task...

and navigation systems for robot developers and manufacturers.

Founded in 1995, it was an early developer of autonomous robots ubiquitous to universities and often the first serious robot used by students involved in learning to be roboticist

Roboticist

A roboticist designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots. Since robotics is a highly interdisciplinary field, roboticists often have backgrounds in a number of disciplines including computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering...

s, as evidenced by the fact that it was chosen by Microsoft as the reference platform on which to implement their new Robotics SDK and is supported by ROS

ROS (Robot Operating System)

Robot Operating System is a software framework for robot software development, providing operating system-like functionality on a heterogenous computer cluster. ROS was originally developed in 2007 under the name switchyard by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in support of the...

and Player Stage Robot APIs.

Following in the footsteps of Cybermotion and MDARS-I, the company developed security robots, but with more powerful computers and new autonomous techniques such as SLAM, Monte Carlo/Markov localization and modified value-iterated search path planning to create a new generation of autonomous robots for delivery and security purposes in hospitals, offices, labs and other buildings.

MobileRobots has also been a pioneer in flexible intelligent AGV applications, designing the Motivity control system used by RMT Robotics to develop its ADAM iAGV (Self-Guided Vehicle), used for complex pick-n-place operations, in conjunction with gantry systems and industrial robot

Industrial robot

An industrial robot is defined by ISO as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes...

arms, used in first-tier auto supply factories to move products from process to process in non-linear layouts. Smaller versions also work in semi-conductor plant clean rooms, carrying product from workstation to workstation.

In 2007, the company released a unique omni-directional Seekur security rover. The omni-directional wheels let it drive sideways as well as forwards and back, to perform in tight spaces. In early 2008, Seekur demonstrated autonomous navigation in GPS-blocked spaces around buildings.

In 2009, the company expanded the capabilities of its Motivity robot autonomy to enable fleets to behave more like people, following site-specific traffic rules and varying its speech and other aspects of its "personality" in ways appropriate to its workplace.

On June 14, 2010 MobileRobots Inc. was acquired by Adept Technology

Adept Technology

Adept Technology, Inc. is a multinational corporation with headquarters in Pleasanton, California . The company focuses on industrial automation and robotics, including software and vision guidance. Adept has offices throughout the United States as well as in Dortmund, Germany, Paris, France, and...

. Since then the company has been testing mobile conveyor robots and telepresence systems for use in corporate and hospital settings.

William P. Kennedy, PhD, Co-Founder
Bill Kennedy (computer scientist)
William P. "Bill" Kennedy, born 1951, is the former editor-in-chief of A+ Publishing, including MacComputing, A+, and PC Games magazines. Kennedy was an early participant in Real World Interface along with Grinnell More, inventor of the PackBot. When RWI combined with Colin Engle, Joe Jones and...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.