Later On

Strange beast near the sea

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1. Theo Jansen is a rare treasure, no matter how you look at it. Although his book, The Great Pretender, is somewhat handwavy (especially on philosophical issues), it’s still a great read whether you’re an artist, designer, or engineer. He also gives a mean TED talk.

   I tend more toward engineer myself – and interestingly, my job involves building robots. After seeing his machines two years ago, I immediately ran to the lab and figured out how to implement it in LEGO. (If you happen to play around with LEGO at all, I’d be happy to provide instructions for it, or for any of the other robots in that book (check the other videos). I also apologize for what is possibly the worst men’s hairstyle ever seen since the late 1960s; I was growing it out and the videos were filmed at an awkward time in that endeavor.) It’s not wind powered and is fairly rudimentary, but it works. And has been used to teach cognitive science at the honors undergrad and graduate level, so something must have worked.

   There’s also a group in Louisiana that assembled the Cajun Crawler, essentially a Segway with legs like this instead of wheels. And there’s perennial requests from my friends for me to rebuild my Catrike Expedition to operate on a similar principle, just because a pedal-powered walker would be awesome.

   

   Brian D

   22 January 2011 at 11:54 am

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