The Gigabots started as a pilot project with the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund with a goal to bring realtime connectivity to educational robotics. The Gigabots have been piloted in high school classrooms in the Kansas City Metro area and participated in events like and Maker Parties.

The Gigabots rely on low-latency connections, and allow students to control and program cyber-physical systems in realtime. Additionally these robots can communicate with each other in realtime and this makes it possible to create collaborative behaviors between multiple Gigabots. Since their communication happens over the internet, there is no requirement they be on the same network or even in the same location.

For Gighacks-KC we developed a new firmware for The Gigabots that uses NodeJS, which should make it easier for students to hack on the full stack, and should allow us to integrate The Gigabots with some existing (and interesting) open-source robotics projects in the future.