Hi there,
I have been dreaming about building robots since I was 9 years old. Back then I was reading a lot of Asimov’s books. This was happening around 1980 or so. Unfortunately back then there was still communist regime in Romania and access to lathe machines and materials were almost impossible. Fortunately electronics circuits were available in the underground market. So i learned electronics. Later I focused on computers and software.
I’ll fast forward in order not to bore you. Two years ago I got my first 3d printer. First was bought at work and shared with my colleagues. Quickly I realized the potential of actually building things and the idea that lurked in the back of my head surfaced again. It was time to try to build robots.
I searched the internet for the projects that would be close to my ideal vision and I found Inmoov project. So I decided to start from there and modify to suit my needs.
What i want is a robot that would be:
- Human size robot
- Human like robot
- Safe to be used by children
- Reliable
- Easy to remote drive it in telepresence kind of way
- Easy to replace defective parts
- Each limb to have it’s own electronics, motors and “intelligence”
My friends when first saw what I’m building asked : “what are you going to do with it?” . I usually have the following answer for them “I’ll consider it done when it will be able to take the command: “get me a beer from the fridge” and the robot to be able to navigate itself to the fridge, open it, get a beer and bring it to me.
But it’s way more than that. Let’s consider current global trends. Humanity started to push towards multi-planetary living. That means that a lot of robots will be needed in order to perform necessary tasks for mining, building and maintaining off world colonies. And those robots will need to be autonomous to a point and to be able to be controlled remotely by operators.
Not to mention that some of the robots are needed back here on earth to assist children in learning or elderly.
So to put it in simple words … “I’ll be happy when we will have open and easy to build and easy to control robots on another planet”
Here are some more links unrelated to robots but i think will give you more understanding on who am i:
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer/
- http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-251071.html
- http://www.tfm.ro/catedrala-si-bazarul/
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-mix-of-poverty-and-piracy-that-turned-romania-into-europes-software-development-powerhouse/