With the launch only being a couple of days away, I wanted to take the time in this post to talk about what inspired me, the future of Muribot, and where I'd like to see it go.

As I've said in the past I created Muribot because I wanted to bring a high quality robotic platform to the market that would be useful not only to teach kids about programming but to explore advance concepts that someone at a university might be researching. I needed the platform to be not only low-cost but also very functional and adaptive. There's a well known graphic that some of you may be familiar with a triangle and at each point is cost, quality, and time. And you can only choose 2 of the 3.

I'd like to believe that I managed to get all 3 but in reality I've actually sacrificed a lot of my personal time developing Muribot. I first posted about my robotics development on my tumblr blog back in 2013, but that prototype had been in development for ~5 years prior. In fact I actually gave a talk about MINI Mouse at the 2011 BA-Con (now defunct?) here in Columbus.

I was inspired by a demonstration of a Khelpera mobile robotics platform back when I was in high school. The demonstrator had the robot running a mapping program, and then downloaded the data from the memory. I was enchanted because I've been programming from a very young age, and to see something that linked the real world into the world of programmng was something I desired ever since that day.

But the problem for me is I come from a middle class family with a stay at home Mom and a brother so while we had quite a lot, we didn't have enough money to ever justify the ~$3,750 cost of one of those platforms. Nor would I ever have asked! Even back then I'm sure it would have been possible to create something similar to Muribot, and I recognized that fact and it stuck with me.

Fast forward to about 2008, and I'd spent a number of years building small electronics on breadboards and messing with microcontrollers. And the idea about the Khepera popped in my head again and this time, I had the skills to do something about it.

Using acrylic and motors from Pololu, parts from digikey, PCBs from ExpressPCB (Very expensive! Use Elecrow instead!) and sensors from Sparkfun and Acroname, I spent the next 5 years off-and-on, designing a robot that costs ~$600. A robot that would eventually become Muribot. I knew that was still too expensive and it looked terrible, but it was nearly as cheap as Muribot and most importantly it worked. This was all the confirmation I needed to charge forward toward my aspirations.

I then spent the next 6 months doing what took me 5 years prior, a testiment to the skills I had gained. Back in October 2014, Muribot Revision A01 was produced

This robot had numerious issues, and several oversights with the H-Bridge rendered backwards motion inoperable, but it was completely functional otherwise. This test production confirmed the design was functional, more importantly it was cheap enough that selling it was now a viable option!

BUT! The problem, we are a small (VERY small) local organization, not even a licensed company, that has a small local following. We don't really have the capacity to advertise, and we all have day jobs that prevent us from simply devoting all our waking time to MOAR. We had juggled around the idea of doing a kickstarter for MINI Mouse but it was just NOT something that was production quality, but now it seemed like this would be the perfect way to get the fruits of our hard work into the market.

Thus here we are, after another 6 months of planning and refining the and testing the design. The kickstarter is almost here! So lets talk about what's going to happen afterwards!

There's a definite possibility that we could simply fall flat and not generate enough interest to even get a single backer, although that isn't very likely. More likely is that we simply don't reach our goal, and that's one reason we love kickstarter. If we don't reach it, you don't lose any hard earned money, and we get an idea of how interested people are in our product. I think that's a win-win for everyone!!

We could also reach our goal, which would be wonderful because that would mean that my hobby could potentially turn into my job, and I would absolutely love to actually make Muribots for all of you. We're estimating anywhere from ~100-500muribots will have to be made and everything is ready to go in that regard, however…

we could absolutely SMASH our funding goal…I'm not emotionally prepared for this one honestly, but I am prepared in the sense that I have numerious stretch goals planned if that were to occur. And potentially some extra surprises to add to the rewards!! I really only need the funding goal, and I'm not greedy enough to even expect this result.

If we don't meet our goal, we will probably try again after digesting the feedback we get from this kickstarter. If we do meet it however, we will be able to easily produce Muribots en masse as well as any of our other products. We'll actually be able to market the platform and by doing so possibly have some other distributers interested in stocking a few of them.

At the same time, once we are selling Muribots, we can start taking the time to focus solely on MOAR and creating even smaller, cheaper, and more capable products. We could host workshops around the Columbus area, and really get kids involved in robotics and programming.

I would love to see MOAR robotics become a misnomer, I would love to see people across the world with Muribot and its future cousins. I'd love to be able to find workshops using my product across the world, I'd love to see researchers in AI, autonomous navigation, and swarm robotics using my product to do their research.

Some people might think those are big dreams, big aspirations.

But I say if you aren't dreaming big, if you aren't trying to make the biggest impact in the world your skills can let you; then you're simply not dreaming big enough.