Robosapien: Latest Toy Robot From Mark Tilden

Onnimikki writes "Mark Tilden has been building really cool BEAM robots for a long time. Now, he's come up with RoboSapien, a toy that no self-respecting geek can go without. Videos of the RoboSapien at the 2004 New York City Toy Fair have been made available by Solarbotics. Mark offers some really good explanations about what makes them work."

Comments

Imagine if he spent $200!

[erick99]

Watch the demo video, the first one on the video page. The technology behind this robot is amazing! Each movement of the robot, for example, returns 50% of the energy used back to the batteries. This means the robot can run it's seven motors for 20 hours. While the robot itself is pretty wild - it can do some pretty wild things and not fall over - the real benefit, I think, is in how these innovations can be translated into more serious robotic applications. If he can do all of this with two chips and 12K of assembler code, imagine the possibilities for something that might cost a bit more than this robot's $99.

Happy Trails!

Erick

At last

[CrystalCut]

A small, somewhat cute robot that wouldn't freak you at at 4 AM if you bumped into it.

Actually, I found this pretty cool. Amazing these little guys have such ablities consdering the technology.

After seeing countless videos of many different robots, this is on the only one I could see putting on my desk. Don't know how the ghosts who haunt my abode are going to feel about it though.

My favorite Mark Tilden story

[Anonymous Coward]

I got this at least second hand so if somebody has a more accurate version I would be interested to hear it.

Mark was giving a presentation at a conference. He was showing off one of his small insect robots. He then (to the audience's horror) crumpled it up like a wad of paper and put it down on top of the overhead projector. The audience was then able to see it unfold itself and walk away.

Unfortunately, the story has a larger context which explains how it comes to be that Mark is down in the States rather than still here in Canada. Again, I would be interested in hearing an accurate version of the story.

Re:My favorite Mark Tilden story

[mkucic]

This is true! Mark Tilden visits the Telluride workshop each year. This is gathering of Neuromorphics junkie, I being one of them attended one year. He builds robots using a very simple basic building block. Each building block being able to run on its own. The building blocks connect together to form a larger system. He can literally damage the system and it will continue to operate. Each block adapting to the lack of input from its neighboring block. Kinda weird to watch someone rips wires out of the gut of a system and then see the thing adapt to the loss and still move along.

Re:Popular science quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the robots he builds aren't build using fast microcontrollers and heuristics to get things to move. They're designed using analog techniques (i.e. discrete amplifiers, capacitors, and resistors instead of a custom ASIC - similar to the way people designed things like TVs 30yrs ago with only a couple dozen transistors versus the millions of logic gates in modern TVs). So instead of using a digital timer on a chip you could use a charging capacitor. Well designed analog systems can be much better than digital solutions.

The main reason people don't do things in analog more often is that its hard to design and its typically even harder to design something that can be mass produced (due to tolerances/ manufacturing variations). A popular control systems design book has a photo of his UniBug on the cover because it's such a neat applications of controls theory. The bug can walk without needing any long fine tuning to get parameters to just the right value.

Of course analog design suffers from a whole host of problems that the digital world is relatively immune to. For example, noise in an analog system is a huge killer whereas noise in a digital system isn't so bad untill you start working at >100MHz. For example, 1-2mv (that's 10^-3) of noise in your analog system can be deadly if you're amplifying that signal by 100x-1000x whereas 1-2mv of noise in a digital part isn't such a big problem.

Re:This is not especially interesting

[elmegil]

It does sound automomously programmable, just not completely behavioral like Aibo. Of course it's not $1500 either. Also there's this bit from the All Nerd Review article:

What Tilden emphasized with the RoboSimian, was the customization possibilities involved. Are you listening, action figure customizing freaks? Now you can dress up and paint your very own robot. He also said that because of its affordability, techno-geeks (I'm looking at you, Dave) can open this sucker up and play around with his insides, looking to see not only how he works, but what can be done to him. Wise move.

If Mark Tilden says he made it so you could play with the guts, I think I'm gonna want to play with the guts.