Tori

I was over at a friend's house having dinner with him and his wife one time. He had just come back from Japan where he had attended a robotics competition. He asked me if I wanted to see the 'coolest thing ever'. Of course I did. he showed a video that he had taken of robot-one robots that they were starting to build over there. Robo-one robots are small humanoid robots built basically out of just servos. They competed in contests of agility, speed, and 'kung fu'.

I was immediately hooked. I decided to build a robot that could be compete in robo-one competitions. All of the robots that I saw then (and mostly still to this day) moved in pre-programmed motions. I had a background in animatronics so I decided to make two changes to what they were doing. The first was to control the robot with a waldo that I would wear so that it would imitate the motions that I made. The second change was to not use the output of the servos directly in many cases. All of the robo-one robots that I saw used the output of the servo motors directly without linkages. I dove into it pretty hard for a few weeks and came up with a lower torso and a waldo that I could wear. I came to two realizations. One, I didn't think that I could control the robot well enough to actually walk because the moment of inertia is a lot lower for a five-pound robot than it is for a 160 pound human. The second realization was that if I continued to work on that robot, I would put myself deeply into debt. Because of those two reasons, I decided to stop working on that robot

This is the only video that I have of it working. The quality of it is terrible since I didn't have a decent video camera back then. I think that I used an older (for the time) webcam to shoot this video. I obviously didn't have the left leg calibrated very well when I shot the video but the right leg is pretty good.

In case you are wondering, I called this one Tori because I was taking judo at the time and the person who was the agressor was called Tori at my school.