About Robot Rebuilt

The basics

Robot Rebuilt is a robotics company, based in the US, and incorporated in December 2010. Its founders are Eduardo Torres-Jara (president) and Paul Fitzpatrick (goat herder).

The team

Eduardo and Paul have been building and rebuilding robots a long time. Here are some highlights of what they've been up to.

• Eduardo developed sensitive manipulation, an approach to robot manipulation that uses the robot hand itself as the dominant sensor. It is said that, in battle, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Likewise, in robotics, how you sense and react during contact makes the difference between success and failure.
• Paul explored manipulation-driven vision, finding all sorts of ways to use a robot's perception of its own body as a tool for measuring the world around it. A clumsy grasp based on a mistaken plan can reveal everything needed to get it right next time. You just have to be watching.
• Paul is lead developer for YARP, a thin middleware used on everything from humanoid robots with racks of servers, to tiny embedded systems. He also works with the Data Commons Cooperative and has developed the Coopy toolbox for collaborative data projects. Then there's MakeSweet, which has nothing to do with data really.