Drones, curriculum, and code. Built in America.
FTW Robotics builds the Hopper, an American-designed and American-manufactured classroom drone, and Build Fly Code, the platform that has brought drone education to schools approaching 3,000 across all 50 states. We own our flight stack end to end, we build it here, and we stand behind every drone that ships.
American-made, teachable, and it ends somewhere
Most classroom drones are built overseas, and one district at a time they are being pulled off approved-vendor lists. FTW is on the other side of that line. The Hopper is designed and manufactured in the United States, on a supply chain we control, and we own the entire telemetry and flight-control stack ourselves, with no outside dependency.
Hardware is only half of it. The reason drone programs stall is that the teacher does not feel like an engineer, so the kit ends up in a closet. We built Build Fly Code for the teacher who has never flown anything, with a curriculum ladder that runs from an elementary classroom to a Part 107 pathway on one platform. It does not just work. It ends somewhere.
Designed and manufactured in the United States, on a supply chain we own. No overseas dependency, no approved-vendor risk next year.
Build Fly Code assumes the teacher is not an engineer. Open the box, follow the lesson, and the whole class is flying.
One platform from elementary through Part 107 and college engineering. A student who starts in fourth grade can finish on a credential.
Two cofounders, and a team behind the product
FTW Robotics is led by two cofounders, Rob Harvey and Bob Ganton, with a team of engineers and staff who design, build, and support the Hopper and the platform behind it.
Rob started out as a musician, playing in bands through his college years before joining Interscope Records in 1999. For the next two decades he developed and broke artists at the highest level, across Interscope and Republic Records and then Spotify, culminating as Global Head of Artist and Label Services.
He knows both sides of that world, the craft of making something and the work of carrying it to the people who need it, because he has lived both. Building the Hopper and the platform behind it is the same arc over again: iterate until it truly works, then lean in hard behind it.
When he walked into the public school his daughters would attend, he saw an education system walled off from the technologies its students were about to enter, and he set out to close that gap. To him, FTW is not a career change. It is the same thing he has always done, at a scale he has never done it before.
Bob is a veteran engineer and systems architect who spent his career building the hardware and software inside the products that made mobile computing work, at Qualcomm, Motorola, and others. He is also a licensed airplane pilot, so the person who designed the Hopper knows real flight firsthand.
At FTW he leads engineering: he and his team design, build, and support the Hopper and the platform it flies on. Every Hopper is designed and manufactured in America, in-house, on a supply chain built for it.
He has also coached youth robotics teams for nearly three decades, which means he was doing a version of this long before there was a company attached to it.
Lean by design
Together Rob and Bob built the Hopper, a fully U.S.-designed and U.S.-manufactured drone, and Build Fly Code, the platform that has brought drone education to schools approaching 3,000 across all 50 states, from elementary classrooms to the U.S. Naval Academy.
FTW is lean on purpose. Rob and Bob lead a team of engineers, educators, and operators who build and support the product every day, in a company the two of them own and run. They stand behind every drone that ships and every classroom that flies.
Firmware 2.0 is here: the platform Hopper was always meant to be, the first fully stable American flight stack, refined over years of real classrooms and real flights. Every existing Hopper gets it free, because that was the promise. We build until it's right, then we go all in. It's right now.