Pint-sized Marty robot wins design award
A mini robot created to inspire budding engineers and scientists has won a £24,500 entrepreneurial award.
Marty the Robot was the winner of the Design & Creativity Award at Scotland’s leading company creation competition, the Converge Challenge.
Edinburgh spin-out Robotical Ltd, which designed and built Marty, was awarded a £10,000 cash prize and £14,500 in business support.
Dr Alexander Enoch developed Marty as a side project during his PhD studies in Neuroinformatics at the University’s School of Informatics.
Innovative design
Marty is a fully programmable, WiFi-enabled walking robot for children, makers and educators.
The robot was designed to make learning about programming, electronics and mechanical engineering a fun and engaging process.
It can be customised and upgraded with 3D printed parts, and is compatible with single board computers, including Raspberry Pi.
Supporting entrepreneurs
The Converge Challenge is a company creation competition and entrepreneurship development programme. It is aimed at staff, students and recent graduates of Scottish universities and research institutes.
The contest aims to support the next generation of entrepreneurs in Scotland by providing practical commercial skills to help bring novel products and services to market.
The Design and Creativity Award was introduced to this year’s competition to celebrate Scotland's Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design.
Winning the Design & Creativity Award means a lot! Marty the Robot is designed to help people get hands on with programming and robotics, but that all starts with an appealing design that people actually want to engage with. We're also hoping to spur creativity too, as it's such an important skill to foster. I'm really grateful to the University for all the support I've had whilst starting up Robotical, from the early meetings with Launch.ed, to hosting me during my Enterprise Fellowship.