Washington spins out underwater telerobotics firm BlueHaptics.

US-based University of Washington (UW) has spun out BluHaptics, which is developing underwater telerobotics.

Howard Chizeck’s lab in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering is working with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to create a control system for underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

The BluHaptics robotic control system is based on key algorithms developed by Fredrik Ryden in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering, as part of his PhD. This work was originally directed to robotic surgery,

UW’s Center for Commercialization (C4C) and the Washington Research Foundation provided $50,000 from its $1m annual Commercialization Gap Funding budget to BluHaptics and granted Ryden a Commercialization Post-Doctoral Fellowship that gives him a year to work on the technology and business.