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The Cyber 310's background, in the words of David Sands its creator.

"The history of the Cyber 310 robot: in 1980 I wanted to market a robot to schools and colleges. I was already selling heaps of computers. My designer at the time came up with a robot, can't remember what it was called, and wrote some control software for the PET in Basic. I designed the electronics. The company ran out of money, basically through not fulfilling orders - there were plenty of sales. The designer left and I started getting flack from customers about the software. I had already done masses of industrial equipment programmed in Forth so I finally sat down with a PET and wrote ROBOFORTH in a week of evenings. It was more reliable and of course faster than Basic.

Thereafter, every time someone complained about a software problem, I just sent them a ROBOFORTH disk and never heard from them again. I then relaunched the idea and got Bibby's to back it. Hence Cyber Robotics. All this was in Cambridge. My mechanical engineer, Neil, designed the new robot to my instructions, Cathy George designed the electronics and I wrote the software. But we were getting many semi-industrial enquiries that the 310 could not do, so I wanted to design something bigger. Bibby wouldn't back that so I left and Bibbys moved the company to Stone, Staffs. I also put my control language, ROBOFORTH, on the Armdroid. And of course I still use it on our robots, though in a much more advanced form."

See the Links page to visit David N Sands' website and view his latest industrial robot designs.


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