ROBO-ONE Robots: The First Dynamizer
With only 53 days left on the calendar before ROBO-ONE 10 kicks off in mid-September, we've been watching a lot of activity on the weblogs of ROBO-ONE robot builders. Most of them are busy tearing down, rebuilding, testing, and sometimes completely redesigning their robots. It's not unusual for them to do a completely new design in the six months between the major competitions here in Japan.
So, that lead us to wonder about the actual lifespan of a top ROBO-ONE robot. A professional human athlete can expect to compete for at least a few years, and sometimes for a decade or more. In contrast, ROBO-ONE as a robot sport is around four years old at most, but some of the robots have been redesigned as many as 10 times in that short span.
Regular readers of Robots Dreams are already very familiar with the current Dynamizer, created by Sugiura-san, but until now most of them probably haven't seen what the original Dynamizer of just a few short years ago looked like.
Notice that many of the servos only have
horns on one side. At that time they had
to use standard off-the-shelf servos that
weren't designed especially for humanoids.
The Cateye brand of bicycle headlamps
seems to be a favorite among Japanese
ROBO-ONE builders.
Sugiura-san's designs are unique in that
he thinks in 3-D. Many of the other
builders constrain their designs to
Cartesian coordinate systems with lots
of 90 degree angles. Dynamizer was
designed from the beginning as a
3-D robot with curves and complex angles.
As you can see from the stickers
on Dynamizer, Sugiura is a big
Roland fan and machines all of
his robot parts on Roland equipment.
There are at least 3 different
types of servo horns used on
Dynamizer, may be more.
The current Dynamizer:
Related links:
Dynamizer's Official Website (Japanese)
You might also enjoy:
- Robo-One Robots: Dynamizer
- Project M: Dynamizer Jr. "Kappa" Robot (Video)
- Dynamizer Has A New Robot Pet!
- Dynamizer's Robot Cat (Video)
- Dynamizer Runs Loose In Akihabara! (Video)
