Having been acquired by Raytheon in 2007, in January 2015 a consortium of several of the original Sarcos players bought back the entity now with facailities in Salt Lake- its orginal home, and in Bellevue, WA. Launched primarily as bioengineering research institution with strong ties to University of Utah, Sarcos had early been involved in developing speciality in robotics, microelectromechanical systems, medical devices, artificial limbs, and powered exoskeletons. For example, the firm developed artificial limbs using sensors to detect the subtle skin or muscle movements and translate them into limb movement. These ahead-of-its-time capabilities caused the firm to attract the attention to commercial interests across a range of markets to include animated film props, prostheses, and human/computer interfaces. Sarcos produced a wide variety of robotic devices for different applications: undersea salvage robots used by the United States Navy and other units for law enforcement organizations; robotic props for films and amusement park attractions. Sarcos built some of the animated pirates seen in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at four Disney theme parks; the Wicked Witch of the West audio-animatronic at Disney's Hollywood Studios; The Great Movie Ride; robotic dinosaurs for Jurassic Park: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, and fountains for the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. A particularly high attention project was an SBIR Award from DARPA that took the firm into design of a powered exoskeleton suitable for military applications. In November 2007, Sarcos Research Corporation was acquired by Raytheon Company where they continued work on an extensive range of dextrous hands, robotic actuators, non-industrial low end robots, robotic range sensors, animatronic environment equipment and interactive entertainment hardware.
