Luna: the 5-foot-tall personal robot that ran a $999 Kickstarter
In 2011, the startup RoboDynamics made a quiet splash with Luna, a home-service robot sold in a small $3,000 batch. Three years later, the company — together with design studio SchultzeWORKS — brought her back with a Kickstarter campaign, betting that "every home deserves a personal robot" and cutting the price to make that plausible.
Luna is deliberately people-sized: 5 feet tall, 60 pounds, with positionable metal arms, a capacitive touchscreen, and an HD camera. She navigates flat surfaces on her own. But the hardware is only half the pitch — RoboDynamics CEO Fred Nikgohar designed her as a platform. Inside: a Mini-ITX motherboard, dual-core x86 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 16GB of SSD storage, and 802.11n WiFi. The software stack is Ubuntu Linux plus ROS, the open-source robotics framework — meaning owners and developers can customize, upgrade, and build new apps and services for her. Nikgohar's ambition was an "app store model" for robots: Luna as the iPhone of robotics, the device an ecosystem could finally grow around.
The company had form here. Before Luna, RoboDynamics sold an enterprise telepresence system called TiLR to large institutions for $30,000–$50,000. Luna was the consumer bet — a far cheaper, friendlier descendant of that idea, launched in 2011 "mainly to start a conversation" and then refined over three years with better features, lower manufacturing costs, and developer relationships, according to Nikgohar.
In her 2014 iteration, Luna retailed for $1,500 — half the 2011 price — with Kickstarter backers able to pre-order her for $999. The campaign was aimed squarely at developers and entrepreneurs who might build the apps and services that give a home robot a reason to exist, rather than one more single-purpose gadget.
Whether personal robots were finally about to have their moment was an open question — robotics researchers like Cynthia Breazeal were making the same bet at the same time — but Luna was one of the most serious attempts to get an open, programmable, human-scale robot into ordinary homes.
Based on reporting by PSFK, December 2014.
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