ST Robotics

ST Robotics is a twin company based in Cambridge, England, and Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The company designs and manufactures low-cost bench-top industrial robot arms and purpose built Cartesian robots. The company has no sales force and sells their robotic arm products mainly through the Internet as "boxed robots" with distributors around the world.

In 1981, David Sands formed the company Intelligent Artefacts which was based in Cambridge, England. One of its products was educational robot arms. The arms were programmed in the programming language BASIC and would run on any of the popular makes of computers of the time such as Apple (Apple II series), Acorn Electron, Atari, BBC Micro or the Commodore Pet. The robot competed with others in that market like the Armdroid. As the language Forth became available on these computers, Sands wrote the first version of RoboForth which enabled the robots to run and respond far faster. A version of RoboForth was also written for Armdroid.

In 1982, Intelligent Artefacts was closed down and a new company formed, also in Cambridge, called Cyber Robotics who sold a redesigned arm known as the Cyber 310. The Cyber 310 had a 5 degrees of freedom (DOF) ability. Hundreds of them were sold around the world between 1981 and 1987. The robot arm was adopted in 1987 by Mike Topping as the basis for the Handy 1, a robotic helper for the severely disabled. Cyber Robotics was bought by the Bibby Corporation in 1982 and it was eventually closed due to lack of sales.

During the period that Intelligent Artifacts was in operation, many inquiries were received for more serious and professional uses of robot arms for which the Cyber 310 was not suitable. This alerted David Sands to the potential for manufacturing a bench–top robot arm series, some of which already existed, notably the Zymark.

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