About

Ferradyne is a robotics company founded by two builders to keep people out of harm's way. We make ground robots that work alongside the crews who use them in emergency response and industrial inspection, along with the sealed actuators those robots depend on.

Story

The crews who keep communities and plants safe are stretched thin. Volunteer departments are short of members, city departments answer more calls than they can staff, and fires and floods are placing heavier demands on both.

In industry, routine inspection still sends people into areas everyone would prefer they stayed out of. In each case someone has to walk into a place they cannot yet see, and what they need first is information.

Many robots available for that work are still remote-controlled tracked vehicles steered from a handheld screen and have not kept up with latest developments:

• Field-oriented BLDC motor control
• Cycloidal gearboxes
• Robot Operating System
• High-bandwidth radio transmission
• Autonomous Navigation and Mapping (SLAM) with 3D LiDAR and depth cameras
• Non-linear control design with Reinforcement Learning
• AI for perception and speech

We are building the generation that uses all of it, designed from the start for dust, water and hazardous areas. And we are building it to work with people: a robot that understands what it is asked, follows instructions, answers questions about what it sees and about its own condition, and is safe to work beside.

Ferradyne was founded by Val Novytskyy, a self-taught engineer, and Jupiter Moore, a physicist. The two met at a makerspace, where Val was building a human-scale robot from scratch and Jupiter joined the build. That project gave us our direction: robots tough enough to survive the outdoors and strong enough to be useful there, where help is far away.

Ferradyne is ferrum, Latin for iron, plus dyne, the unit of force, from the Greek dynamis. Iron plus force: strength that is measured and controlled.

Mission

To build field-ready robotic systems that help people safely see, understand and act in hard-to-reach environments.

• We develop with the people who will use them, and test in real operating conditions.
• We do customer discovery as part of building the product, not after it.
• We make capabilities that earn their keep in emergencies and in the recurring high-risk work between them.

Vision

A world where robots extend human reach into places that are too dangerous, difficult or inaccessible, working alongside the people who depend on them as trusted members of the crew.

In the long run, we want human entry into hazardous and confined spaces to be the exception instead of the default: uncertainty turned into actionable intelligence, faster, without putting someone in harm's way to get it.

Values

1. Innovation: we build real hardware, validate it in the field, and solve from first principles instead of copying existing robots.
2. Leadership: we move boldly and set direction instead of following the usual designs.
3. Integrity: we earn trust with clear data and honest presentation, and we choose lasting value over shallow opportunism.
4. Self-sufficiency: our robots work alone in hard-to-reach places where recovery is costly, and our products depend only on our other products and commodity parts.
5. Adaptability: we iterate quickly and change shape around the fundamental vision, across terrains, missions and payloads.
6. Usability: we build for the people in the field, not to impress investors or to sell the least functionality for the highest price.

Team