Robotical was founded in 2016 and aims to inspire, engage, and educate the next generation of engineers and scientists by letting them get hands on experience with their very own actual walking robot. Its first product is Marty, a patent-pending, fully programmable walking robot.
Robotical is headed-up by Dr Alexander (Sandy) Enoch, and successfully crowdfunded via IndieGoGo to generate the funds needed to produce the first batch of Martys. The idea spun out of Sandy wanting a real robot to help his niece learn how to code, but also to provide a proper robot to the massive community of makers and educators at a reasonable price. Marty can be upgraded, controlled over WiFi, programmed in languages such as Scratch and Python, and is Raspberry Pi compatible.
Sandy comments: “We are delighted to welcome Fiona to the Robotical team, and look forward to working with her as we continue our exciting expansion plans. This is a key appointment for us; a big part of Fiona’s role will be to reach out to educators to let them know about Marty and how he can make learning about programming, electronics, and mechanical engineering fun and engaging. Marty has already received an extremely positive response, and we aim to build on this in the coming months. We’re excited to be putting cutting edge technology in the hands of the engineers oftomorrow.”
Robotical recently raised its first round of seed funding, securing investment totalling £285,000. Investors include lead investor Rob Dobson, Gareth Williams from SkyScanner and Professor David Lane from the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.
Marty has won several awards since its creation, including: a Scottish EDGE Award 2016, Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship, 2nd Prize in the EU Robotics Forum entrepreneurship award, and the Converge Challenge Design and Creativity award.