Plaidophile

One of the few things I had a chance to do in Tokyo which wasn't in the set of {"having meetings","eating","sleeping"} was to go to Kiddyland in Harajuku. It's 6 floors of toys! One of the toys I found was a little tiny robot bug for about 1200¥. Of course, since I can't read Japanese, all I had to go by was what I could see of the robot, and through the transparent casing I could just see a pile of transistors, and the antennae looked like they were passive things. Could this be a BEAM robot?

So of course I bought one. Earlier today (well, technically yesterday, now) I finally unpacked it and played with it.

Sadly, no, it isn't BEAM. They've gone out of their way to make it look like one (for some reason) but the legs are all linked together, the antennae actually have active sensors, and the robot is just programmed to move forward until an antenna triggers, at which time it backs and turns away from whatever triggered it for a few seconds before moving forward again.

It's disappointing, but not particularly unexpected. Although it does make me wonder why they went to so much trouble to make a traditionally-controlled robot toy look like BEAM, when the circuitry for an actual BEAM robot would have been much simpler and cheaper to make (although a walker would either require more motors or the use of nitinol, which may have driven up the cost considerably).

I guess I'll still just have to build my own if I want to have an actual insectoid robot buddy.

(Now if only I could find a YouTube video of a Mark Tilden insect-type walker. Well, I did find one, but it's in Spanish... I guess you can still get the idea from it though.)