This week we’re featuring Mike’s interview with Nick Kohut, Co-Founder and CEO of Dash Robotics.

Nick is a former robotics postdoc at Stanford and received his PhD in Control Systems from UC Berkeley. At Dash Robotics, Nick handles team-building and project management.

You can find all the interviews here. We’ll be posting one per week on Robohub.

Link to audio file (24:09)

In this episode Matthew Schroyer speaks with Nick Kohut, CEO of Dash Robotics, about their foldable hexapod robot and the ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get them into the hands of budding engineers, kids and hobbyists.

Dash is the result of years of research in fast prototyping of bioinspired robots at Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley (see Fearing Podcast or Hoover Podcast). The palm-sized origami robot is now available for the general public to build and program. The robot takes inspiration from insect locomotion by using compliant and light weight hardware to drive over difficult terrain without using any complex controllers (see Bob Full podcast). You can check out their Dragon crowdfunding campaign for a chance to get one of the first 1000 robots. The campaign ends on October 2nd.

Nick Kohut
Nick Kohut is the co-founder and CEO of Dash Robotics. He is also a postdoc at Stanford University in Mark Cutkosky’s Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory, working on a variable stiffness suspension element for humanoid robotics. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, developing small legged robots. His research focused on the development of an active tail to enable high speed turning. In the past, he also did research on centimeter scale robots, and using GPS and traffic information to improve fuel economy.

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Dash is the first product to launch today on Dragon Innovation‘s new hardware crowdfunding site. Dragon Innovation was founded in 2009 by Scott Miller and Herman Pang, ex iRobot and Hasbro. Dragon are partnering with GE, Qualcomm and freescale to bring us this new hardware crowdfunding site, which seems to be nicely positioned to accelerate startups somewhere in between Quirky, IndieGogo and the nuts and bolts of real world accelerators. Of course, Dragon are also behind Bolt, Boston’s new hardware accelerator.

The first 5 products on the crowdfund site include: Dash, the cockroach inspired robot; Mimo, a smart baby body monitor; Ollie, a slim flat multipurpose tool; LIMBERboard, a flexible wearable microcontroller board; and RunNRead, making reading while exercizing easy. It’s not clear whether the Dragon site plans to be more than just a shopfront for Dragon products but Dash is a cool little robot.

The Dash team from Berkeley Biomimetics Millisystems Lab have turned their research into an affordable, educational arduino based cockroach inspired robot kit. The manufacturing process is even more interesting. Dash is made using smart composite microstructures, or SCM, a technique allowing flexible joints or moving components to be made from the same sheet of material as more rigid body or limbs.

The SCM material is a sandwich of cardboard, plastic, and adhesive. We laser cut windows in the cardboard, leaving only the flexible polymer behind. This allows the windows to flex like a hinge. By cutting these hinges in certain locations and patterns, we can build up complex folded mechanisms such as hips, joints, and transmissions. As a result, Dash is very quick to fabricate, and design changes are easy. [Dash Robotics]

Of course, any product from the Berkeley Biomimetics Millisystems Lab is leveraging years of research into things like gecko adhesion, cockroach running and dragon fly flight. The springiness of natural animal locomotion has been incorporated into the mechanics of Dash’s design, enabling Dash to move and turn quickly without needing heavy, expensive servos or powerful processors.