The school semester is winding down at local colleges and summer vacation is upon is, making this blogger’s life a whole lot harder. But before they locked up at RIT, they gave us one last nugget of awesomeness: that a new project aimed at creating an autonomous humanoid robot (automaton, if you like. Or android) will be housed on the RIT campus.
TigerBot is a 31″ high automaton built to scale of a human model. Its original intent was to design for robot-wonky things like collision-avoidance, wireless and voice control and interactivity, but the lead professor says it’s usefulness has gone well beyond that. In fact, the plan is to have TigerBot – or some derivation of – guide students through tours of the campus in years to come.
They consider TigerBot to be a “platform,” meaning that successive RIT robotics students will continue to expand on the original idea. Professor Sahin plans to have the robot completed in three years.