Been dreaming of a having a robot at home but want something more than Romo the iPhone robot and can’t afford to lease an Asimo? Thecorpora may have just the robot for you. After six years of work, their cute and cuddly Qbo is finally ready to roll into our open source hacking and hardware tinkering arms. The company just put Qbo on pre-order.
The release marks a day of realization for TheCorpora founders Francisco and Carlos Paz to create a low cost, open source, general purpose robot. The whole idea behind Qbo is to have a standard robot flexible enough to configure and improve to the individual’s liking.
The Qbo Pre-Order comes in three flavors: Qbo Basic, Complete Lite, and Complete Pro. The Qbo Basic Kit, which costs €499 ($657) includes a chassis, mounting adapters, webcams, and five open source controller boards that will need to be configured to run motors and sensors. The user will have to provide motherboard, microprocessor, memory and other essentials. The Qbo Complete Lite is €1,699 ($2,236) comes with an Atom D2700 Mini-ITX board, 2 GB of DDR3 memory, HDD and WiFi. And the Qbo Complete Pro, available for €2,299 ($3,026), packs an Intel Core i3-2100T, 2 GB of Ultra Low Profile memory, 40 GB Intel HDD SDD and Wi-Fi.
You can check out the more detailed specs here. The prices are listed as “special,” promotional prices and are sure to go up some time after Qbo is released in Q4 of this year.
It’s a special day for the folks at TheCorpora, as Carlos Paz wrote on the company blog, “Only time will tell if I really managed to help Robotics and Artificial Intelligence to reach homes around the world but, whatever happens, I have the satisfaction of knowing that all I have experienced during this project was worth it and I will always feel proud for having pursued my dream.”
We hear you, Carlos. A home robot is a dream for us too.
[image credits: Thecoropora]
images: Qbo
