60 SERVO 08.2016
Today’s robots have evolved into many variations to serve countless
industry, university, military, and
domestic applications. With flashy
capabilities that amaze us, we rarely
venture beneath the shell of a
particular robot to ‘see what makes it
tick.’ It is the many parts,
components, and systems under the
hood (so to speak) that make any
robot what it truly is.
The quality of a robot and its
subsequent reliability, functionality,
durability, and cost-effectiveness relies
on what it is made from: its parts.
This applies to amazing multi-billion
dollar robots such as the Mars Science
Laboratory rover, Curiosity, down to a
small educational robot such as the
popular $199 Parallax ActivityBot. The
idea and design may be superior, but
it all gets down to what the robot is
made from. A great idea coupled with
cost cutting on parts and materials
can result in a not-so-great robot.
Have your parts match a good
design, sensible prototyping, testing,
and proper manufacturing to result in
a great robot. That principle applies to
both large industrial products, as well
as personal robots for the home and
homebuilt robots. I would like to take
a closer look at the selection of parts
that a successful commercial robot
manufacturer (Softbank) used that
could help an experimenter in locating
parts for their robot building project.
Softbank’s Pepper
Robot
Before delving into specific robot
parts, let’s look at the robot, Pepper
that was recently introduced to the
market and that Tom Green
highlighted in his previously
mentioned article. Last June, the large
Japanese conglomerate, SoftBank
launched their latest product (Pepper)
in Japan. Figure 1 shows Pepper
being presented to the press by
This is one serious and well-
Figure 2.
