Robot developer Misty Robotics has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help it develop a robot on its own robotics platform. The company released Misty I, its developer platform earlier in the year, but now wants to launch a robot that allows developers to tinker with code.
The Misty II robot has been designed as a social or personal robot, connecting with its maker and others with ease. It stands at 35cm and packs in a vast array of sensors to help it operate, such as Sony’s 4K camera tech for facial and object recognition, eight time-of-flight sensors for obstacle avoidance and a 3D Occipital sensor for mapping.
It runs on two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that you’ll usually find packed inside a smartphone rather than a robot, but they provide enough power to make Misty II work effectively.
The best part of Misty is that it can be trained to do whatever its owner likes without the need for training, which is usually the case with robots of Misty’s stature. Software-wise, Misty can run Tensorflow, Caffe, and WindowsML and it supports a number of external component add-ons created by Misty and other hardware developers in its community.
But unlike other crowdfunding campaigns that want to get their robots off the ground as soon as is humanly possible to present a return for investors, or just make money themselves, Misty thinks it’ll take up to ten years to get anything back from the ‘bot.
The robot’s makers said Misty has been specifically created for software developers, STEM students, and makers to create their own applications and services for the robot. It reckons thousands of new use cases will start to filter through in three to five years.
The Misty II crowdfunding campaign can be backed from just $1499 on the Misty Robotics site now.
