About Us

Our Story

In 2012, Jason Huggins combined his expertise in software test automation with his passion for robotics to create the a shoebox-sized robotic machine that he programmed to play Angry Birds. He featured this machine at various software conferences, mostly for fun. However, he quickly received serious inquiries from Fortune 100 companies asking him to make touchscreen testing machines for them, too. And so Tapster was born. In 2015, Jason accepted an investment from Indie.vc and founded Tapster Robotics in Oak Park, Illinois. The Tapster team designed its manufacture-on-demand robotics workshop in 2017 to support its iterative design process. Tapster continues to foster a company culture of creative experimentation. Sometimes these experiments result in self-playable musical instruments, dancing robots, and collaborative partnerships with high school robotics teams. Encouraging the team to play leads to innovative solutions to modern hardware testing problems. This is the crux of Jason’s vision and passion for robots and Tapster’s raison d'etre: build the robots to do the repetitive work so the people can work on other projects. If you are interested in working with Tapster, please get in touch with us.

Our Values

Open Source Designs

Tapster Robotics believes in collaboration and growth. There is no better way to grow knowledge than to share it, and that is why our robots are open source designs using open source software.

Iterative Process

The Tapster workshop is outfitted with all of the tools (and toys!) that embrace the Iterative Design Process, enabling the team to test and improve on the fly.

Ideas are Everywhere

With a focus on creativity, Team Tapster is always open to a fresh idea. To keep the creativity flowing, Tapster invests in employees personal creative endeavors including (and especially!) those that are non-robot related.

Jason Huggins

Founder / Engineer / CEO

In 2015, Jason Huggins founded Tapster Robotics in Oak Park, Illinois. Jason also started the popular open-source test automation projects Selenium and Appium. Selenium is used to automate web browsers, while Appium automates mobile apps. These tools have become standard choices worldwide. In 2013, Jason Huggins was selected to join President Obama’s “tech surge” team tasked with fixing the troubled HealthCare.gov. site. At Tapster Robotics, Jason has combined this unique automated testing experience with his life-long enthusiasm for all-things-robotic. Prior to starting Tapster, Jason was founder and CTO at Sauce Labs and an automation engineer at Google.

Meg Sweeney Nelligan

Chief Operations Officer

Meg Sweeney Nelligan joined Tapster at its inception in 2015. She has adapted her experiences in advertising (The Leo Burnett Company) and promotions (Yahoo! Inc.) to run operations, marketing and sales. Meg's keen sense of organization and ability to think creatively have been essential to Tapster's growth. She is delighted that when referring to her Tapster toolbox she often means the actual tools (and not the virtual kind).