Evolution Robotics raises money, wins award

Evolution Robotics Inc which has been out of the radar recently has had a very interesting last 10 days.

Last week, the company was able to raise 13.88 million dollars in funding from a number of venture capital firms. Evolution has been around since 2002 as a startup company with seed funding from Idealab and it is one of the few post dot-com bubble Idealab companies that, in my opinion, has some major chances for success considering the strength of their visual object recognition technology ViPR and robot control architecture ERSP (even though the recent rise of Microsoft's Robotics Studio is probably hurting the popularity of their product.) When the Sony AIBO was still under development, Evolution was providing the robot's visual recognition modules which allowed AIBO to recognize a number of different command cards. It will be interesting to see what Evolution will do with the extra cash in hand and what new technologies and robotics applications they might develop over the next few years. The consumer robotics market is expected to continue growing at fast pace over the next few years. All that is missing at the moment is the killer application that will encourage most people to buy robots (kind off like the iPhone for robotics.)

Today, Evolution also became the first recipient of the the first annual Robotics Development Innovator Award for the NorthStar 2.0 technology. NorthStar use artificial landmarks to help robots localize and navigate in an indoor environment. A partnership between Evolution and WowWee that was established last year came to fruition in the Rovio robot which uses NorthStar for navigation. Rovio has received lots of positive reviews ( unfortunately, I have not had one to test myself) since its release.

Finally, Evolution and WowWee also released a new web site with video tutorials for Rovio owners. Eventually, the same web site might also become a good resource for hackers and robot hobbyists. Check it out at NorthStarTutorials.com.