Thanks for your question. I'm sorry that I can't share with you our exact sales numbers for the QuadRover at this point. We are early in our sales cycle. If I had to catagorize the numbers in words I would say well or even better to this point. This new Robot is a shift from any other robot Parallax has produced to date in both in size and price point. As we found out recently at the Embedded Systems Conference, customers who had viewed the unit on our web page were even more amazed and impressed with the quality, size and design functions of the unit when viewing it in person. We understand this is not necessarily a high volume product but one that reflects Parallax's commitment to listening to what our customers want by providing high quality, innovative and·fun products. Steady sales and happy QuadRover owners would satisfy us! As for·any future robots, you never know...
Personally, I'd love to see some more advanced robots like the QuadRover. It's very hard to find good quality kits between the few hundred dollar range and the $5k and up range. The QuadRover is intriguing, but I'd prefer a straight battery powered kit for indoor use. In an ideal world, it would be a fairly expandable platform, so that you could start out with something simple, and ad to it.
I'll probably be buying the 12 V motor kit. I'd like to see more stuff like that.
Have you guys ever seen Kenneth Maxon's site? He has some amazing machined robots that could give you some good ideas. Though some of them are probably quite expensive (like his Mars rover).
Or, if you remember, Radio Electronics had a pretty good bot caled the R-E robot from about 18 years ago (they ran it in a series of articles over the course of about a year). A sturdy, expandable platform like that would be nice.
Also, I wish there were some better arms. I just can't get too excited about servo based arms. I'd love to see something like the Rhino Robotics XR-4 as a kit, perhaps with updated motors and controllers. Or just provide the mechanicals, and let people develop their own controllers for it.
Comments
Thanks for your question. I'm sorry that I can't share with you our exact sales numbers for the QuadRover at this point. We are early in our sales cycle. If I had to catagorize the numbers in words I would say well or even better to this point. This new Robot is a shift from any other robot Parallax has produced to date in both in size and price point. As we found out recently at the Embedded Systems Conference, customers who had viewed the unit on our web page were even more amazed and impressed with the quality, size and design functions of the unit when viewing it in person. We understand this is not necessarily a high volume product but one that reflects Parallax's commitment to listening to what our customers want by providing high quality, innovative and·fun products. Steady sales and happy QuadRover owners would satisfy us! As for·any future robots, you never know...
Best Regards
I'll probably be buying the 12 V motor kit. I'd like to see more stuff like that.
Have you guys ever seen Kenneth Maxon's site? He has some amazing machined robots that could give you some good ideas. Though some of them are probably quite expensive (like his Mars rover).
Or, if you remember, Radio Electronics had a pretty good bot caled the R-E robot from about 18 years ago (they ran it in a series of articles over the course of about a year). A sturdy, expandable platform like that would be nice.
Also, I wish there were some better arms. I just can't get too excited about servo based arms. I'd love to see something like the Rhino Robotics XR-4 as a kit, perhaps with updated motors and controllers. Or just provide the mechanicals, and let people develop their own controllers for it.
It might exist elsewhere in the forums, but if not, a thread for discussing suggestions for bot products might be nice.
Joe