With only nine days to go now, the Raprio Kickstarter has been a huge success. Thanks to notoriety from the Raspberry Pi foundation, and many open source blogs talking about it, the Raspberry Pi powered robot has over 300% of its funding already. We caught up with Shota Ishiwatari, creator of the Rapiro, and of the Necomimi robotic cat ears, to find out a bit more about the project and himself.
Ishiwatari is no stranger to robotics. At Univeristy his major was in Mechanical Engineering, and participated in RoboCup where his Rescue Robot team won first place for mobility in 2005. He has since then made the Necomimi cat ears and two robotic tails: “I think the success of Necomimi gave me self-confidence, and [a good reputation]”