Founded in 1990 by a trio of MIT alums, iRobot’s first big break came in 1998 with a DARPA grant that lead to the development of their now-famous PackBot. The automatic vacuuming robot Roomba, the company’s flagship civilian product, was launched in 2002 and has become a resounding commercial success, with more than six million units sold to date.
If you’re in Portland, OR for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, come to the expo floor and check out the Maker Shed. We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff for sale here; Arduinos, Mintduinos, Mintronics Survival Packs, Netduinos, books, and more.
Founded in Shikuoza, Japan in 1946, Kabushiki gaisha Tamiya was originally a sawmill and architectural lumber company that made wooden ship models as a sideline. Their first plastic model, released in 1960, was a 1/800 scale battleship Yamato. Today, Tamiya manufactures R/C sea, air, and land vehicles, robots, educational materials, and a line of modeling tools, paints, and accessories in addition to their traditional scale model line.
Gordon McComb is helping us out on the site this month in support of the release of MAKE Volume 27, our latest robotics issue, and for our monthly Robotics theme here online. Gordon has also just release the fourth edition of his groundbreaking book, Robot Builder’s Bonanza. The first edition of this book was released in 1987 and pretty much launched the hobby robotics field. This was the book that got me into robotics, which lead me into electronics (and Forrest Mims’ book), hardware hacking, and most of my high-tech making interests.
Founded in 1987 in Rocklin, California, Parallax, Inc. manufactures the famous BASIC Stamp microcontroller. The Stamp has been popular among electronics hobbyists since the early 1990s, thanks to such user-friendly features as an embedded BASIC interpreter.
We were all pretty wowed back in January of last year when Parrot introduced their Parrot.AR quadrotor drone. Wowed because A) it’s a quadrotor, and we’re still kind of on our collective honeymoon with the quadrotor concept in general; B) its fancy fly-by-wire system makes it so stable and easy to fly that virtually no training or practice is required…
Make: Live airs tonight! Ep12 is all about robots, to celebrate the upcoming release of MAKE Volume 27. Robot hobbyist Andrew Terranova will show off some of his own homemade ‘bots and will be answering your robotics questions. Tim Laursen will also join us with one of his incredible Robot Drummers, which will be performing […]
