While CyPhy isn’t among the army of drones in the tech spotlight at CES 2015 in Las Vegas this week, its drone program is being closely watched as its founder helped brand and bring robots into the home as the co-creator of the Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner that launched 1,000mobile kitty videos.
Recently named to the CNBC Next list, Grenier co-founded iRobot, whose technology helped the U.S. military set off bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guardian notes in a profile.
On the consumer front, iRobot’s smart home products are still best known for the Roomba, which has sold 10 million units. Sixty percent of those Roombas, by the way, have been given names by their owners.
At her six-year old CyPhy startup, Grenier is still coming up with pithy product names (such as “The Department of Failed Good Intentions”).
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
