DigitRobotics LLC, founded by a pair of University of Massachusetts Amherst Ph.D. students, wants to do some of robotics researchers' work for them.

The company plans to sell its uBot to people who make robots, according to its co-founders, Bryan Thibodeau and Patrick Deegan.

Academic robotics research often includes building a robot from scratch, a labor-intensive process that a base robotics platform could eliminate. The uBot balances on two wheels, can pick objects up with its arms, and can interact via Skype using a camera and a computer monitor for a "head," giving researchers the core robotic functions they might need when developing their own specialized robot.

The two-man company already has customers; it is building three uBots for the MIT Media Lab, which uses the uBot as the body/chassis for Nexi, its emotion-expressing Mobile/Dexterous/Social robot. The partnership grew out of an informational visit by the UMass researchers to the Media Lab, according to Rod Grupen, director of UMass' Laboratory for Perceptional Robotics, and Thibodeau and Deegan's doctoral adviser. Digit had already planned to target academia before the meeting.

"We showed the video to roboticists and a lot of times, the reaction we got was, 'Well, can I get one?'" Thibodeau said.

The research market for robotics platforms has been growing since the mid-'90s, according to Jeanne Dietsch, CEO of MobileRobots Inc., an Amherst, N.H., company that also services that market. In 1995, robots were built from scratch, expensive, fragile and scarce - only a few grad students had access to them. The advent of companies selling robotics platforms, such as her own and ISRobotics, a forerunner of iRobot Corp., grew the market outside its grad student confines, Dietsch said.

"There are a lot more undergrads than grad students," she said.

The uBot's evolution started with the small uBot-1, meant to be deployed in swarms funded by a three-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of about $1 million. UBot-2 introduced the ability to balance on two wheels, much like Segway Inc.'s Human Transporter. The third uBot added arms for pushing objects. UBot-4 introduced the current form, larger and more humanoid-shaped than the previous three. The current, fifth uBot introduced its telepresence feature. Digit is also working under a NASA Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant to develop software to control whole-body mobile manipulator robots, such as the uBot-5.

Digit said it ultimately plans to market the uBot as a health-care robot, as a way of keeping the elderly out of nursing homes. The robot could pick someone up after a fall, clear objects out of the way, call an ambulance, or collect vital signs while remotely controlled by a doctor. The uBot's cost needs to decrease before Digit enters the health-care market, though it may already be a cost-effective alternative to a nursing home, Deegan said.

"Having a robot like this in the home 24 hours a day, 365 days a year may be close to break-even or better," he said.

Grupen said if Digit were to sell the prototype uBot-5, it would likely cost about $65,000, and manufacturing efficiency could bring that price down to about $30,000. He said that Digit would likely begin marketing its health-care robot once that price point is reached.

Dietsch said Digit may find itself at the high end of the research market, which she estimated at $10 million to $15 million. That includes schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon University - "schools that want one of everything, especially a cool robot like that," Dietsch said. MobileRobots plans to have a $10,000 robotics developers kit ready in November, including a wheeled base, autonomous guidance system, and developer modules, Dietsch said.

Digit may also be lowballing the robot's price, something Dietsch said was common when engineers start companies.

"They'll sort of forget to pay themselves salaries and forget that there's overhead involved," she said.