In the News
Taking Robotics Over the Sun
OVER THE SUN'S KAI STAATS JOINS ROADNARROWS ROBOTICS
LOVELAND, COLORADO, 29 September 2010 - RoadNarrows, LLC today announced the expansion of its staff to include Over the Sun's founder Kai Staats, as the Director of Research & Strategic Development.
Based in downtown Loveland, Colorado RoadNarrows, LLC specializes in robotics for the research and education markets, providing value-add sales to top-tier robot products, research and development of industry unique solutions, and contract engineering services.
RoadNarrows has this year increased its capacity for research and development, bringing on-board Collin Horvat, M.E. Mechanical Engineering, CSU; Brent Wilkins, M.S. Mechanical Engineering candidate, CSU; Daniel Packard, B.S. Mathematical Physics, UNC and M.S. Candidate in Complex Adaptive Systems from Chalmers Technical University, Gothenburg, Sweden; Casey Kuhns, B.S. Engineering Physics, UNC; and Kai Staats, B.S. Industrial Design, ASU, founder and former CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, developer of Yellow Dog Linux.
Kim Wheeler, co-founder and CEO at RoadNarrows states, "This is a powerful time for RoadNarrows. We are growing carefully, organically, through maintained customer satisfaction, strong industry partnerships, and government funded research initiatives. We are bringing on-board the right people at the right time, giving rise to innovation which we believe will place us in a position of leadership in the robotics and intelligent systems industries."
With over 200 educational and commercial customers, RoadNarrows' experience in sales, support, and development grants the small company a deep understanding of the robotics industry.
"Historically, we have developed and manufactured interposing motherboards which help tie the various components of existing robotics systems together. Coupled with our own in-house developed BotSense software, a researcher, educator, or hobbyist may more rapidly move to higher levels of engagement, spending less time on just getting the robot to function, and more time on functional processing and routines," states Robin Knight, co-founder and CTO at RoadNarrows.
This current growth of the robotics industry is seen by many as the third wave in the industry, one that most believe is here to stay. While processing power has increased according to Moore's Law in supercomputing, desktop, and robots alike, the useful functionality of entry-level robotics has remained relatively unchanged.
Knight continues, "While there are incredible efforts being made in universities and government organizations toward advanced artificial intelligence and robotic platforms for military, medical, and manufacturing applications, the reality is that the cost of entry remains out of reach for the average home, school, or light commercial consumer. We are working to change that, with our sights set upon functional robotics systems at a reasonable, consumer cost."
The field of robotics encompasses a wide variety of applications, including education and entertainment, transportation, industrial manufacturing and hazardous waste, military, planetary exploration, and bio-medicine.
Kai Staats, Director of Research & Strategic Development at RoadNarrows states, "Since the early days of machine automation, the goals have remained relatively the same--to provide humans with a higher quality of life by saving time, improving quality of service and product, and reducing risk of injury. But robotics has not, to date, become a must-have public facing technology as have mobile phones and laptops. Learning to use a computer is today part of growing up, but robotics remains relatively out of sight. We believe that as we learn to work side-by-side with robots, we will also become as comfortable with robots as we are today with Facebook. RoadNarrows is moving to be a part of this inter-generational transformation."
In the fourth quarter of 2010, RoadNarrows plans to release the first version of the "Hekateros" family of robotic manipulators to a select set of customers. Hekateros are intelligent, robotic arms which operate in arbitrary and variable environments through an integrated perception-actuation control system.
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About RoadNarrows, LLC
Based in Loveland, Colorado, RoadNarrows is a privately held robotics and technologies company founded in 2002. RoadNarrows sells and provides technical support for some of the most popular robotic product lines used by the academic and research community world-wide. RoadNarrows Research & Development develops intelligent peripheral components and accessories, including cameras, mobile sensor architectures, and open-source platform software to give robotics researchers advanced, time and resource saving tools.
For more information, visit: www.roadnarrows.com
About Over the Sun, LLC
Over the Sun is an innovations company exploring product development opportunities in diverse markets, including social networking and mobile, personal computing. iConji marks OTS's first product delivery.
For more information, visit www.overthesun.com
The Press & Media may contact OTS for more information.
"RoadNarrows" and "BotSense" are copyrights of RoadNarrows, LLC, all rights reserved.