📝 Version 2: Technical & Educational

Let me show you something interesting.

The smartphone in your pocket has more computing power than the entire wheelchair industry has ever put into a mobility device.

I've been a wheelchair user my whole life.

And I can tell you exactly what's inside most power wheelchairs today.

Lead acid batteries. The same chemistry from 1859.

DC motors with no encoders — the chair literally doesn't know if it's moving.

No sensors. No software updates. No intelligence whatsoever.

Here's the technical problem.

Every wheelchair manufacturer uses proprietary, closed-source systems.

The electronics are locked down.

The software is secret.

The communication protocols are undocumented.

If you're an engineer who wants to make wheelchairs better?

You can't. There's nothing to build on.

University researchers can't access the systems.

Students can't study them.

Innovation is structurally impossible.

Now let me tell you about something that worked.

Android.

In 2008, Google released an open-source mobile operating system.

Anyone could see how it worked.

Anyone could improve it.

Anyone could build on top of it.

What happened?

Thousands of engineers around the world started contributing.

Samsung, LG, Motorola — they all built on the same foundation.

Competition happened at the application layer, not the infrastructure.

The result? Smartphones got good. Fast.

RAMMP applies the same principle to wheelchairs.

RAMMP stands for Robotic Assistive Mobility Modular Platform.

It's a complete, open-source wheelchair platform.

Funded by forty-one million dollars from ARPA-H — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

That's the same lineage as DARPA. The agency that created the internet.

Here's what we're building:

Open hardware. Mechanical designs, electronics schematics — all public.

Open software. Built on ROS — the Robot Operating System — used by thousands of robotics teams worldwide.

Open documentation. Everything you need to understand, modify, and extend the platform.

This isn't one company. It's a consortium.

University of Pittsburgh — home of HERL, the Human Engineering Research Laboratories.

Carnegie Mellon — world leaders in robotics and AI.

Cornell. Purdue. Northeastern.

The best engineering minds in the country.

All building on the same open foundation.

When a researcher at Pitt solves a problem, everyone benefits.

When a student at CMU writes better navigation code, it goes into the platform.

The best ideas win. Not the biggest legal teams.

Once you have an open platform, you can build anything on top of it.

Robotic manipulation. Arms that can reach, grasp, and hand you objects.

Autonomous navigation. The chair understands its environment and helps you move through it.

Smart home integration. Your chair talks to your house.

Sensor fusion. Computer vision, lidar, IMUs — all working together.

And because it's modular, you can add exactly what you need.

The platform grows with technology. It doesn't get stuck in the 1990s.

Here's a concrete example of why this matters.

Right now, if your power wheelchair breaks, repairs take three to six months.

Why? Proprietary parts. Exclusive distributors. No documentation.

With an open platform, any qualified technician can diagnose the problem.

Parts are standardized. Documentation is public.

Repair times drop from months to days.

RAMMP is infrastructure.

Like the internet. Like Android. Like ROS itself.

We're building the foundation so everyone else can build on top of it.

Open source mobility.

For everyone.

— END V2 —