Origin

An ambitious mobile robotic platform for testing my skills and learning new ones. Inspired by robots real and sci-fi.

I'm working on a droid-robot-thingy and have struggled to categorise it. It's not a droid in the traditional sense, but then "robot" doesn't seem quite right either. I started referring to it as a droidbot-thing. It's kind of my seventh robot project, depending how you count it, so in my head it became Droidbot-thingy-7, bit of a mouthful. Then that's not too bad as an identifier: DB-T7.

I originally wanted to build my own R2-D2, but I also wanted the option to try out new things and possibly play with machine vision, speech recognition and similar. I love the Astromech's "Swiss army knife" features but an R-Series droid was not looking like a suitable platform considering it's obviously a fixed design and that I also wanted it to be able to operate "in the field". R2 is just not the best platform for "off-road". So I started from scratch; what did I want?

I came across a totally impractical (impossible if you examine it) piece of concept art by "RD7" that really caught my eye. The image was labelled RD7-06 "Field Support Mech". I had the form/function stuck in my head for weeks and began to ponder how it could fit with my design goals. Then Boston Dynamics introduced Handle to the world and that confirmed I needed wheels on my legs! That allows different development stages too (rolling, balancing, walking etc). I'm aiming for something with retro-futuristic-industrial character and not just look like R2 grafted on to some legs.

It's an ambitious long-term project and because I'm not where I'd like to be with it yet, I've pretty much been working in a vacuum. I will almost certainly need the help and support of others doing similar things so I have created this site and reached out in a couple of different forums. Now I'm really looking forward to what's next.

- Outsider