StartUp Beat

According to Evolution Robotics, an IdeaLab operating company, the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs commissioned ITRI to create a national robotic software development kit to provide an industry-standard platform for robotics.  The company says that this software development kit will offer Taiwan’s corporations, labs and universities best-in-class tools for developing a broad range of new robotic products and applications, as well as providing a path for incorporating and sharing new technologies over time.

Evolution Robotics says that by adopting the Evolution Robotics Software Platform (ERSP) architecture, ITRI supported organizations in Taiwan will not only have fully working software for building and running their applications, but also a common standard for integrating technologies with each other as well as companies around the world.

“Well over 100 different companies and universities have licensed the ERSP platform for research and commercial development,” said Dr. Paolo Pirjanian, president and CEO of Evolution Robotics.  “Now, with ITRI’s forward-looking efforts to establish standards in the market, a company in Taiwan that develops a new telepresence control application could easily license that to a company in Europe that has a mobile robot on the market running the ERSP architecture.”

“We believe this coordinated approach using our SDK and the ERSP architecture will lead to much more rapid innovation of new technologies, faster time to market for new products, and overall, a stronger competitive position for Taiwan in robotics,” said Chan An Pao of ITRI.

Evolution Robotics says that components of the ERSP have been used on a broad range of products on the market, from the Sony Aibo entertainment robot and Sharper Image eVac robotic vacuum cleaner, to most recently Banda’s NetTansor home telepresence robot and a variety of visual search programs for mobile phones.

Evolution Robotics – www.evolution.com

ITRI - www.itri.org.tw/eng