Donate to Robohub for a chance to win a Parrot minidrone

Robohub is now running its annual holiday fundraising campaign and everyone who donates will be entered into a drawing for a Parrot minidrone! Our summer campaign raised $6K, enough to cover our operating costs for about one month, and we want to do even better this round. We are very grateful to our top donors from our last campaign, including 3D Robotics, OSRF, Frank Tobe of The Robot Report, and AJung Moon of the Open Roboethics initiative (ORi).

2014 has been a tremendous year for Robohub. In addition to growing our readership to over 65,000 unique monthly visitors, we have doubled our contributors, helped two robotics startups successfully fund their crowdfunding campaigns through our Indiegogo Partnership, brought several IROS 2014 presentations directly to our readers, and launched a new educational robotics review series for kids. We also hit major milestones in our social media reach, including: 650,000 Google+ followers, 4,500 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook fans.

Some of our accomplishments since our spring donation campaign:

• Four new focus series:
  • Robots for Eldercare: What role will robots play in caring for our seniors? Robohub covered the practical, social,  ethical, and economic considerations of robotic care for seniors.
  • Regulating robotics – Do robots need to be regulated? This was the question everyone in the robotics community was asking this fall, and we worked hard to find diverse perspectives among those in the know.
  • Robots in arts and entertainment – Onstage and behind the scenes, a look at the robots that amuse, entertain and make you wonder.
  • Autonomous Car R/Evolution – What technical advances are bringing autonomous cars and highway systems closer to reality? How do autonomous vehicles experts envision the future of personal transportation? What are the market, legal and policy forces at play?
• IROS Cam 2014 – The 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014) was in Chicago this year, and members of the robotics research community descended on the Windy City. This year the organizing committee experimented with a new 3-minute presentation format followed by an interactive session, and we invited researchers to give their “pitch” in front of our IROS cam. Here are just some of the great pitches we came across in the interactive sessions. Watch out for more roving Robohub cams at upcoming conferences, and check out our other IROS coverage here.

• Indiegogo partner page for robotics – At Robohub, we love robot startups and we have a history of helping out. We know it can be tricky to gather the necessary klout and raise enough interest for startups to reach their funding objectives. That’s why Robohub has partnered with Indiegogo, one of the leaders in hardware crowdfunding, to launch a dedicated Robohub Partner Page for robotics. We are very proud of our first two teams, Maker Club and Sproutel, for exceeding their campaign goals!

• Kidbotics – In December, Robohub launched a new educational robotics review series for kids. These reviews are meant to give kids (and their parents and teachers) a sense of whether these will make a fun introduction to robotics for kids with minimal experience. Our first review looks into the depths of the ThymioII, a wonderful little robot by Mobsya with some really great things going for it. More Kidbotics reviews will be coming out in the coming weeks and months, so watch out for them!

Robohub is proud of these accomplishments, but we are just getting started. Our team has even more initiatives lined up for the coming months, including:

• Robot Launch 2015 – our annual business competition for robotics startups, in collaboration with Silicon Valley Robotics
• Coverage of European Robotics Week and ICRA 2015
• More roving Robohub cams and crash courses in science communication at major robotics events
• New focus series: 3D printing, space, exoskeletons and robotic prosthetics
• More listings and resumes on Robojobs

Robohub is constantly looking for new ways to bring you the information you want to hear. Going forward, your support will help us realize even more exciting initiatives, and explore new ways to cover and share the information that matters most to you.

We are incredibly grateful to our volunteer contributors, tech and editorial staff, our readers and everyone who has spread the word about Robohub. With your help we can deliver more content, find new ways to engage the robotics community and fulfill our mission of connecting the robotics community to the public. Keep Robohub going with your support!

Robohub Editors

Robohub Editors