Wyoming-Based Company Makes High-Tech Robots To Go Where Humans Don’t Want To

LARAMIE — Coming off top-level summer internships at prestigious companies like NASA and Qualcomm, one thing University of Wyoming graduates Christian Bitzas and his friend Oreoluwa Babatunde quickly realized is they didn’t like the idea of working a traditional 9 to 5 job in a cubicle for someone else.

And the realization that they’d have to move somewhere other than Wyoming to have the kind of jobs in robotics they wanted?

Deal-breaker.

About the same time the two Gen Z grads were wrestling with this quandary, Bitzas’ dad called him up with a little quandary of his own. He owned a home inspection company and needed something to help him look inside a crawl space too tight for him to physically get into.

He couldn’t find any great solutions in the marketplace, so he called his electrical engineer son to see if he could make something to do the job instead.

This kind of thing was right up Bitzas’ alley. Not only is he an electrical engineer, but he’d done lots of side projects with GIS drone mapping and 3D printing.

It would be a snap, he told his dad, without a second thought.

Light-Bulb Moment

But, as Bitzas was working on his dad’s 3D-printed miniature smart robot crawler, he realized that what he was doing could be the answer to his own problem.

If he and Babtunde, a computer science engineer, started their own company making smart robotic home inspection gadgets, they wouldn’t be working 9 to 5 for someone else. They’d be working for themselves.

And even better, they’d be creating jobs for other engineers like themselves with an interest in robotics. They could help not only themselves, but other fellow students stay in the state they love, with a diverse job opportunity in robotics.

So, the one-off project for his dad suddenly became a prototype.

And, while his dad put this new robot through its paces, Bitzas started working on recruiting his friends, Babatunde and electrical engineer Brady Wagstaff, to join in founding a company they call UplinkRobotics.

Wagstaff was a tough sell at first, but eventually even he came around.

“I started to see that just, yeah, if I was not interested in working for a big company, especially as an engineer, I’d make, you know decent money, but I’d never make a lot of money as an engineer unless I worked 80 hours a week for 10 years,” he said.

But Wagstaff wanted time to hunt and fish and enjoy life, too. So, as he put more thought into his friends’ idea of starting their own company, he decided he was in.

He didn’t want to live to work. He wanted to work to live.

International Clientele

UplinkRobotics, based in Laramie, is barely a year into its manufacturing life at this point, but the Gen Z company has already attracted an international clientele with its smart crawlers, which are designed to go boldly into tiny spaces men dare not try to squeeze into.

The company’s first unit rolled off the 3D printing presses in April 2022, and it passed its 100th unit mark in November.

The company has created a serious edge for itself through rigorous testing by potential customers, which helped them see that the most important characteristic for their smart robot crawler is versatility.

Unlike other home inspection robots already on the market, UplinkRobotics’ smart crawler continues to work even if it gets flipped upside down. The design also makes the robot similar to a miniature four-wheel drive, but one with zero-turn maneuverability, meaning it can do a 360 in place. The machines are precise, nimble and quite versatile.

The company has two smart robot crawler models. The Mink allows inspectors to attach their own GoPro cameras, while the flagship model, called the Marten, has a full camera system and a monitor for real-time video streaming. The Marten has the full kit for a home inspector, with everything needed to see inside tight spaces without actually going there.

UplinkRobotics has so far hired five to six employees, who can easily manufacture between 25 to 30 of these 3D-printed gadgets each month. They’re even hoping to hire more people soon, as they’re already working on additional customized gadgets tailored to firefighters and police officers.

3D Printed Plastic Beats Metal

All of UplinkRobotics’ gadgets are manufactured using 3D-printed plastics, yet the smart robots have enough mechanical strength to hold up to very tough jobs.

“You can get really complicated geometries to make the parts really strong with 3D printing,” Wagstaff explained. “Like, compared to injection-molded parts, they’re really tough and hardly ever break. I think it’s only happened if people dropped them off roofs. So, unless you’re dropping one off a two-story roof, it’ll be fine.”

The plastic 3D printing process is also more versatile than metal pieces would be, Wagstaff added.

“A lot of our competitors make theirs out of steel or aluminum,” he said. “And they’re just glorified boxes at that point, because making complex things that are this small and really accurate is really expensive.”

Changing up the design is also much more expensive with metal pieces. It would cost thousands to change metal tool dies while, with 3D printing, it’s just a matter of a little reprogramming.

Beating Broke College Syndrome

When they started their company, Bitzas, Babatunde and Wagstaff had no startup capital for their idea.

Fortunately for them, though, Wyoming has a lot of programs geared toward helping entrepreneurs get past things like broke college student syndrome.

The trio of engineers found the Ellbogen competition, and successfully beat out other contenders, winning $30,000 in startup funding in 2022.

That way, they were able to not only take an entrepreneurship class with a great business idea in hand, but they had startup funds waiting for them once they completed the class.

Among their first task was to craft a business plan. At first, the trio thought this, too, would be a snap. After all, they had already built a great gadget. That was the hard part, right?

Then they got schooled.

“We had a mentor from the class, and he wasn’t a professor, but he was a guy who just had a lot of knowledge and experience creating businesses,” Wagstaff said. “And before we met Zoey Worthen, me and Christian brought him our ‘business plan.’ And I’m using air quotes when I say that, because it was what we thought was a business plan.”

Their mentor, however, thought otherwise.

“We met with him for probably two and one-half hours, and he was just very blunt about how terrible it was,” Wagstaff said. “And he was instrumental in helping us learn a lot of this by just forcing us to reframe how we were thinking about things.”

That’s when UplinkRobotics picked up its fourth and final co-founder, Zoë Worthen. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs and knew she wanted to start her own business when she took the class. But she wasn’t sure what, until she met the Uplink crew.

Her strengths were the people and communications side — a skillset the fledgling company really needed.

“It was interesting, because I’d never really worked with engineers before,” Worthen said. “So, we had to, one of the big things we really worked on together was the communication side. Getting them to understand that, in a way, it’s not about the fancy product. It’s about the customers and the people we’re presenting to. That was kind of a mind-shift, and I think that was the biggest thing that we worked on as a team, and something I worked on with them.”

Through that process, the three engineers realized they actually needed to simplify their gadgets, rather than go with their engineering instincts to add more bells and whistles.

“We found that people don’t want fancy toys,” Wagstaff said. “They want reliable tools. So, we’ve made our product super reliable, and pretty simple, but it does exactly what they all need.”

Keeping It Wyoming

The most common advice the Gen Z company has been getting from business experts since opening their doors in 2022 is to outsource their manufacturing to China.

“That’s the move,” Wagstaff told Cowboy State Daily. “Because yeah, we could probably make these in China for half the price of making them here. But, you know, then you’re just sending money to China instead of bringing it back into the local economy.”

So that advice is something UplinkRobotics’ four Gen Z founders are determined to ignore.

“It’s against our mission,” Bitzas said. “Our whole mission is to stay in Wyoming and create opportunities in Wyoming. We created opportunities for ourselves (to stay in Wyoming), and we want to hire more people in Wyoming.”

Along the way, one thing about the company’s success has surprised its founders and underscored their determination to keep their company as Wyoming as possible.

That something is good, old-fashioned customer service.

“There were a couple of people doing this before us,” Wagstaff said. “But they were making unreliable, overpriced things and would disappear for months on end. So, you’d buy a $3,000, $4,000 product, and it didn’t work, and the person you bought it from would just disappear off the face of the earth.”

By having local personnel who are responsive and nice to customers, though, the company has earned great word-of-mouth advertising.

“It’s kind of interesting to realize that if you’re just nice to your customers, stand behind your product, you will stand out,” Wagstaff said. “All we have to do is just, if we have problems, fix it. And, when they have questions, we answer the phone. And really quickly, we became the go-to for this industry.”

For this year, the company is hoping to scale up to reach $1 million in sales, something they plan to do entirely in Wyoming. That way, they can keep the Cowboy State as their forever home, along with creating opportunities in robotics for others who want to do the same.

“We all like Wyoming, and that’s a big reason we started this company, especially as engineers,” Wagstaff said. “And our options of doing things that we were interested in were very limited, so we’re creating those things.

“We want to try and help the state diversify and be able to bring money into the state that’s not dependent on, you know, two or three (industries).”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.