KickStarter projects have become very popular and fashionable in the last year. Most might start off slowly at first, but when you think about it, the website is a gold mine for glorious ideas. Like the Romo, the robot with the smartphone brain. Smartphones today are accurately portrayed as tiny portable computers, so Keller Rinaudo and his team decided to use the power of the smartphone and do something different and unique.
So, they built a hardware consisting of tracked, motorized acrylic base which was encapsulated into an analog circuit board, two motors and an accessory port/stand. The base draws its power from a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can be revived with the help of an USB cable. Then you can proceed to programme the robot to carry out a number of tasks but drag-and-dropping on the smartphone screen.
The project was uploaded to Kickstarter in the hope of raising $35,000 in pledges, but interesting enough it ended up raising a total of $114,796 in pledges and orders for about 1,300 robots. The project is now opened to third-party developers, as the initial robot geek team hopes that other minds will join in the quest for improving the creation, thus adding new wonderful feats they haven’t thought of themselves.
And the great news for the owners of Romotive didn’t stop there! The company received 1.5 million dollars in funding from Zappos founder, Lerer Ventures and David Cohen from Tech Stars. Now, that they have more money, let’s hope that Romo will soon be able to be a docking station not only for Apple devices.
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