Last night, co-founders Tom & Jason presented our vision of mobile robotics at Democamp Guelph. We started the talk with the current problems in the industry. There is no complete solution for mobile robotics integration. The Hydra system we are proposing includes hardware, software and communications. It is designed to use a multitude of sensors and actuators from all different manufacturers, and software tools such as Matlab, Labview and Simulink so that robotics engineers can use the tools they are used to already. Similar to hobbyist environments where the community helps to build the value of the product, we envision the ability for end users to submit feature requests, share-able code and support. The difference between the hobbyist products is Hydra is enterprise grade. The hardware, software and communications are completely polished. Many of the hobbyist options are kludged-together open source tools, which is good to get started, but difficult to work with in the long run. We want companies who build robots to be able to buy something that works right out of the box.

We also showed off the specs of the prototype and the case design.

• Fits on indoor quad-copter
• Future proofed processing
  • Dual Core ARM A9
  • FPGA integrated into the IC
  • Partial reconfiguration enabled
  • Over 1GB Ram, 32GB solid-state
• Expandable I/O
  • 3.2 GB/s to I/O cards
  • Basic peripherals
  • 16 DI/DO
  • 8 Analog
  • 8 UART
  • 2 I2C
  • 4 CAN

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jason Ernst (@compscidr)