/Threaded/ We are the robots
10/01/2007 | Filed under Discover > Threaded
If it can be labelled a robot, it will sell. Oliver Lindberg wades through the flood of mechanical friends hitting the web.
It can talk, perform martial arts, swap personalities, fart and is expected to be this year’s must-have Christmas item. No, it’s not the latest Steven Seagal action figure – we’re anticipating the nextgen Robosapien RS2 Media. Yours for the bargain price of just £299.
It’s no surprise that robots do well around Christmas. We’ve been obsessed with our little electromechanical friends since before the toaster was invented. In fact, one of the oldest-known robots is a Victorian era ‘mechanical man’ affectionately called Boilerplate, who fought as a soldier in numerous conflicts, including the Spanish-American War and World War I. Boilerplate also served under Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution and took part in an Antarctic expedition (bigredhair.com/robots). His is a fascinating story, especially when you find out that it’s all a big fat (but very clever) lie, and that the website is often used to highlight the danger of doing online research. Still, it works, and Boilerplate the coffee-table book will be out soon.
Very real, however, are the robots made from rubbish and turned into amazing works of art. Artists Gorden Bennett (bennettrobotworks.com), Nemo Gould (nemomatic.com), Ann P Smith (www.burrowburrow.com) and LockWasher (www.lockwasherdesign.com and www.flickr.com/people/lockwasher) all use found objects and recycled materials for their creations. Whether it’s old metal, wood, or machines discovered in car-boot sales, it will surely end up as a robot.
Animator, concept artist and steampunk I-Wei Huang, aka Crabfu (www.crabfu.com/steamtoys), builds steam-powered robots, which won him two gold medals at this year’s RoboGames, the United States’ largest robot competition and exhibition. Since geeks like robots and games, there are numerous robot competitions all around the globe, one of the most interesting of which is the All Japan Robot-Sumo Tournament (www.fsi.co.jp/sumo%2De). Watch youtube.com/watch?v=6ZnmmEQXSmI and you can see why little robots are such good wrestlers. It’s a concept we’ve become familiar with since the heyday of Robot Wars, but it’s slightly more unusual to see paper robots designed to fight.
Robots play games
More than 200 so-called Kami-Robo (kami-robo.com), the brainchild of Tomohiro Yasui, exist today. Tomohiro came up with the little figures at the tender age of 10 when he was “swept up in the magical world of solitary make-believe play”. He just couldn’t bring himself to play with his proper toy robots in fear of wearing them out, so he got paper and scissors out. The Kami-Robo were never intended to be shown to anybody, but today Tomohiro is 35 and is a celebrity. He sells merchandising, including DVDs, T-shirts and plastic replicas of his paper originals, and occasionally stages real wrestling events for his fighters.
Robots, in whatever form, equal cash. Ebay, for example, is getting so swamped by robots (4,774 items and counting) that eBay blog Bayraider has launched Robot Tuesday to showcase the best of the lot (www.bayraider.tv/robots). And Lego’s popularity got a significant boost when it released its Mindstorm system, the latest version of which is incidentally used by the Robosapien RS2 Media. Never mind the children, it pushes the geeks’ creativity to its limits resulting in such useful inventions such as Lego robots playing Super Mario Bros (community.middlebury.edu/~tdooley), Connect Four (teamhassenplug.org/robots/ fullcontact) and solving the Rubik’s Cube (jpbrown.i8.com/cubesolver.html). If we can continue to come up with such sophisticated robots, the robots’ intelligence and ability to act could exceed that of humans. The future of mankind is safe. Is safe. Is safe. Is safe. <runtime error>
