I remember the first toy robot that I ever got. It was a pretty simple affair, but at the time I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Basically, it was one of those plastic robot toys that delights little boys the world over by making a lot of noise. It would move around the room, seemingly at random, while waving its arms and flashing its eyes. Smoke would even come out of its head if you would put oil in the little hole on top. It would chant over and over again, “I am the atomic powered robots, please give my best wishes to everybody”.
Robot toys sure have changed a lot since I was a kid! I recently attended a high school robotics conference, where my son w
as competing with a robot toy of his own. The robot toys that they had there were absolutely amazing. Basically, they could walk, detect things, manipulate objects, and even interact with other robots. I was completely blown away by what robot toys could do nowadays. I had never seen anything like it!
Basically, all of the high schoolers would compete with their robot toys. There were different kinds of competitions. Some of the robot toys were controlled by remote controls, while other ones were completely automatic. They would have to do tasks like pickup boxes, move them around, or sort them. They were very basic tasks, but they were incredibly complicated to get robots to do. These robotic toys were not really toys at all. They were sophisticated pieces of equipment, hand built by the kids.
You could tell which high schools had the biggest budgets by how complicated their robot toys were. My son's high school is not a bad school, but it certainly is not incredibly rich. The robots toys that the kids built were good, but they were not the best at the conference. The best ones had incredibly complicated drives that would allow them to move with 360° motion. One of them even had a TV camera built into the front of it so that the operator could see what the robot saw. These robotics toys would be the envy of NASA! In the end, my son made it to the semi finals, but he did not make it all the way. Nonetheless, I knew that he would be back next year with new, better robot toys.
