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Home > News > Dash Robotics
DASH robot components

Dash Robotics

Spring 2015 issue
May 1, 2015 by Paul Preuss
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Spring 2015
  • In this issue

    Features

    In the domain of design

    Jacobs Hall: New home for design innovation

    Design case studies

    Dean’s Word

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    • Simplify: The RISC story
    • Seismic song
    • Fostering disruptive technologies
    • Lost and found

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    • The graphene switch
    • The many frontiers of synthetic biology

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design team | Paul Birkmeyer / Andrew Gillies / Nick Kohut

The Dash Robotics team came together as graduate students in EECS’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, creating minirobots inspired by birds that fly; geckos that climb straight up walls and cross ceilings upside down; and fast, agile, nearly unbreakable cockroaches. It was Paul Birkmeyer’s idea to make a cockroach-like — but much cuter — remote-controlled running robot, its structural parts cut from a flat sandwich of flexible plastic and poster board. Teammate Nick Kohut says that when they put on demonstrations at middle schools, “The kids went nuts.” An educational-toy startup was born, hampered only because “we’re engineers; we could do lots of stuff, but we had no business experience.” The Foundry@CITRIS connected the dots with advice, seed money and access to work space and rapid prototyping. Then it came time to get formal: each member jotted down, in secret, who should do what. They agreed perfectly, says Kohut, who became CEO and handles external relations. Birkmeyer is the CTO, and Andrew Gillies the COO, in charge of product development. Crowdfunding supported the first 1,000 Dashes, which “fold up like origami” from a flat sheet for easy assembly and feature reprogrammable, Arduino-compatible circuitry; they’re fun, sophisticated and, at $50 each, a bargain.

Topics: Devices & inventions, AI & robotics, Design, Electrical engineering, Students
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