Legacy Timeline
- 2010:
Contains videos. First videos of 2010 are two views of a CareBot™ in Elder Care Trials tracking a care receiver.
- 2009:
Contains videos. Coverage of our mobile service robot conference entitled "Mobile Robots in Motion" held November 4-5.
- 2008:
We built our second generation GeckoSPIO™ which furthered our ability to do sensor fusion across multiple systems and subsystems. One of our electrical engineers built up "Carole" CareBot™ prototype that carried all the hardward needed to support GeckoNav™ and GeckoChat™ on board.
- 2007:
We publicly demonstrated one of our CareBots™ in "Darth Vader" garb with a rasping, hissing voice while patrolling tirelessly through crowds of folks at Dragon*Con. And we built our first generation, GeckoSPIO™.
- 2006:
While at Laselle College in Boston, Martin Spencer was an invited speaker and presented "MSR's in an Eldercare Setting" to the "Technology Trends in Eldercare" organized by the administration of Laselle. This response of the attendees was very favorable. One of the videos on the front page of this website was recorded at Laselle to illustrate what "loose crowd" level of autonomy is.
- 2005:
Contains videos. We demostrated our new shroud and electronics, by going to gen3 in our CareBot™ 3.4 MSR product line development. We have the logo developed we are still using. Some of the pictures and videos here are from our public demonstrations of our "loose crowd" level of autonomy at the Robotics and Vision Show in Chicago.
- 2004:
Contains videos. This is the year we got a mold sculpted for a vastly improved look over the previous "garbage can" assembly... And we evolved our logo a bit, too.
- 2003:
Contains videos. With a low cost Toshiba laptop on board, we start demonstrating publicly at places like coin shops, department stores, etc. We also got our first, commercially leased lab space in Conyers, GA. We called "garbage can" shrouded CareBot™ "Emily" after the wife of our then Chairman of the Board, Edmond L. Lamb.
- 2002:
We went to a laser cut frame version of our gen4 frame. We went to the locomotion drive motors we presently use and further refined the sensor fusion system of the CompoundedSensorArray™.
- 2001:
This year we developed "Bertha" our most advanced mobile service robot. "She" had an LED face with pan/tilt for the video camera embedded in her head. She was featured once in a Channel 46 newscast. As you can see, we were still running "brains off board" and experimenting with adding vacuuming capability.
- 2000:
Using our fourth generation frame, we worked on shroud design and further development of our CompoundedSensorArray™ technologies.
- 1999:
We now had our fourth generation frame and we worked on shroud designs. We called our early prototypes "PCR's" since that stood for Personal Computer Robots. At that time we did not realize that it would take 3 or more PC's to have a "complete" personal robot.
- 1998:
Our second prototype frame was "still born" and never achieved any movement, and certainly no level of autonomy whatsoever. However, our third early prototype, BaseBot™ "P3B2", did achieve "scanning sonar" only level of autonomy. This was our first sensor fusion development. Also depicted is an early sonar and IR range finder prototype "CompoundedSensorArray™."
- 1997:
Our first prototype mobile robot was differential drive with "whiskers" for touching walls and obstacles. We ran this mobile robot with "brains off board" and hence proved that a mobile robot did not have to have all the computation done on board for any level of autonomy to be achieved. We also learned of the need for a testing a calibration utility we now call GeckoZap™ for the development of our first mobile robot controller boards.