Ubiquity Robotics
CEO: David Crawley
Founded: 2013
HQ: San Jose, CA
Ubiquity Robotics builds the autonomous mobile robot base Magni, which can carry 100 kilos, runs on a Raspberry Pi and costs less than $2000. Magni can track your position using fiducials or face recognition and move in any wheelchair accessible space. It’s a high quality robot at an incredibly affordable price and the base is becoming as ubiquitous as ROS (the Robot Operating System) in getting other robotics startups up and running. As Ubiquity Robotics claims, “How long would it take you to design, implement, and test a system with payload, navigation, mobility, compute and power? That’s what you save with Magni.”
While the technology/price point is undeniably impressive, the most amazing feature is that Ubiquity Robotics is a genuine homegrown hacker project. Ubiquity Robotics started in 2013 as a community project with as many as 300 people involved at times. The group won the 2013 Coca Cola Hackathon, was a 2014 Maker Faire finalist and featured in two books during the process of product iteration. On the way the project went through 5 major generations of design before market release and shipped the first fully commercial robots in August 2018.
Ubiquity Robotics now has customers for its robots and bespoke robot engineering services on every continent except Antarctica.