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IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Evolution Robotics™ Unveils Open Software Platform for the Personal Robotics Industry

Evolution Robotics to create industry standard to drive business and product development of personal robots and applications for home and commercial use

Phoenix, AZ - February 11, 2002 - Evolution Robotics, Inc., a software technology and services company, today announced the availability of its core product offering, the Evolution Robotics Software Platform, creating what will soon become the dominant open software platform for the personal robotics industry. Built to accelerate the growth of the entire personal robotics industry, the Evolution Robotics Software Platform provides the fundamental building blocks for a variety of personal robotics products and applications and creates a standard upon which all future personal robots can be built.

The Evolution Robotics Software Platform, available initially for Linux in March, offers a comprehensive development toolset consisting of a proprietary software architecture, core software modules, rich developer tools, and hardware kit. The software architecture is an open platform that enables developers to seamlessly integrate software, hardware, and advanced applications to program robots that come alive, act autonomously, and complete complex tasks. The Evolution Robots Hardware Kit, also bundled with the software platform, allows developers to rapidly design and build custom personal robots that showcase their applications to various industries. Evolution Robotics also will provide professional services capabilities to companies initiating robotics projects using the Evolution Robotics Software Platform, through its talented team of roboticists, software engineers, consultants and developers.

The release of the Evolution Robotics Software Platform will bring the company immediate revenue as well as enable the company to aggressively pursue product development partnerships with leading consumer electronics, appliance, automotive, and toy manufacturers, as well as medical, retail, security and office equipment companies.

"The combination of our software platform, hardware kit, and talented team of scientists, engineers and consultants will allow OEMs and companies to incorporate robotic technologies into their product lines and quickly bring to market the next wave of personal robot products for the home and workplace," said Bernard Louvat, President and COO of Evolution Robotics. "We have already seen companies like Sony, Electrolux, and LEGO successfully create early personal robot products for consumers, and Evolution Robotics will fuel this industry further using our superior technology as the standard platform."

"Robotics is an area of research that has very few standards. The sharing of technology is hampered by a general lack of standards. The Evolution Robotics Software Platform is a promising step towards establishing a common environment for sharing robotics technology. By defining an open framework and data model, the Evolution Robotics Software Platform will allow the personal robotics field to expand by sharing engineering efforts," commented Kevin Ross, editor of The Encoder, a newsletter of the Seattle Robotics Society.

Using its talented team of entrepreneurs, roboticists, software engineers, and commercial developers and building technology partnerships with leading roboticists and robotics centers such as the California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Evolution Robotics has developed a proprietary software platform to empower the development of a variety of personal robots. The core software modules consist of a broad range of ready-to-use components for developing robotic functionality and behavior-based applications. Some of these modules include vision, personality, speech, behavior, obstacle avoidance, and target following. Developer tools supporting the platform include various APIs, toolboxes (speech, personality, etc.) and tutorials that will allow software developers, researchers, and robot enthusiasts to create robots and robotic applications in a rapid and standardized fashion.

The Evolution Robotics Software Platform will be bundled with the Evolution Robotics Hardware Kit in the configurations designed for academic and lab environments, individual developers and larger companies and OEMs.

The Evolution Robotics Hardware Kit provides a full set of components for developers to quickly design and build custom personal robots. The Hardware Kit consists of the robot control module, a camera, sensors, stepper motors and a modular aluminum building system. The kit requires a Pentium III 450 MHz or faster laptop computer (or an equivalent on-board computing device) to run the software platform and interface to the hardware components.

The Evolution Robotics Software Platform requires users to have programming experience with C++ and Linux.

About Evolution Robotics
Evolution Robotics, Inc. is a software technology and services company that is creating what will soon become the dominant open software platform for the personal robotics industry. This standard software platform will greatly accelerate the development of personal robots by allowing OEMs and software developers to build personal robots and robotics applications quickly and cost-effectively. Based in Pasadena, California and founded in March 2001, Evolution Robotics has developed the Evolution Robotics Software Platform, a proprietary, open, behavior-based, modular, portable, customizable, hardware-independent and scalable software architecture that will foster the creation of a variety of personal robots and applications. Evolution Robotics is an operating company of Idealab, a creator and operator of technology businesses.