November 2007: digitROBOTICS LLC has been selected for a NASA STTR grant (Rod Grupen-PI, LPR UMass Amherst) to develop control and tele-operation technology for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulators in partnership with the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  We are developing a software library of primitives for controlling whole-body mobility and manipulation tasks that exploit dynamics. 

• http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sttr2007/phase1/awards/press.html (NASA Press release)
• http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/abstracts/07/sttr/phase1/STTR-07-1-T5.02-9886.html?solicitationId=STTR_07_P1 (information on dR/UMass proposal)

July 2007: digitROBOTICS LLC has been selected to build the uBot-5 platform to provide mobility and manipulation capabilities for the Mobile/Dexterous/Social robot (MDS). This work is being funded in part by the ONR DURIP Award "Mobile, Dexterous, Social Robots to Support Complex Human-Robot Teamwork in Uncertain Environments" (Award Number N00014-06-05166, Cynthia Breazeal-PI, MIT Media Lab). The uBot-5 is being modified to use a pair of Meka dexterous hands and to receive an expressive head developed by Xitome for the Media Lab.

In the Press: