Announcing the Winners of the Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition

The wait is finally over! We announced the winners of the Robotics @ Home competition at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 which was held on the weekend. The event was a huge success with over 100,000 people in attendance.

All three winners spent two days with us in the Microsoft Robotics booth at Maker Faire, and it was a blast. Here is a photo of us trying to frantically setup our booth!

And the Winners Are...

 

Second Prize goes to Dan Sionov and the Plant Sitter team, who won $3,000 for their plant- watering robot. We loved the idea of having an autonomous robot take care of plants. Here’s Dan (on the right) accepting his well-deserved prize from Ira Snyder, the General Manager for Microsoft Robotics. And here’s a video of the Plant Sitter in action.

The first prize winner is the KEMODA team with the elderly assistance robot, which was built by Todd Christell. Healthcare is a huge growth opportunity for robotics, and Todd did a great job demonstrating the possibilities as seen in this video. Here is Todd (on the right) accepting his $5,000 check. Well-deserved Todd!

 

 And the grand prize goes to … the SmartTripod robot, designed and built by Arthur Wait. His SmartTripod robot really captured our imagination and demonstrated the type of scenarios that can be solved using robotics as demonstrated by this video. Arthur’s use of the Kinect to implement “Cue Zones” is both unique and very innovative. Here is Arthur (on the left) accepting his grand prize of $10,000. Congratulations to Arthur!

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the Robotics @ Home competition. It was great to see how the participants used the EDDIE platform and Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio to bring a robot to life, performing useful, and in some instances important tasks.

From all of us on the Microsoft Robotics team -- congratulations!!

Habib Heydarian
Microsoft Robotics