Anybots

Anybots was started in 2001 by Trevor Blackwell, a Harvard computer science PhD who had worked on Viaweb and went on to co-found Y Combinator. It was a small private company in Silicon Valley, with around ten staff in 2010 according to Singularity Hub and Blackwell as CEO. David Rogan took over as CEO in July 2012.

Its humanoid work was research rather than product. Dexter was a human-sized biped driven by pneumatic cylinders that walked and jumped with active balance, unusual for its time, and Monty was a wheeled upper-body robot with an 18 degree of freedom hand controlled through a glove and suit. Blackwell said in 2010 that the difficulty of getting Dexter to walk reliably pushed the company toward something it could sell sooner, and both projects were put on hold.

The product that resulted was QB, a self-balancing two-wheeled telepresence robot shown at CES 2009 as the QA prototype and sold from 2010 at 15,000 US dollars, with first deliveries in February 2011. A QX line with larger screens followed in 2013. No unit volumes or revenue were ever published. The company has not announced new products since and is treated here as dormant.