The next movie producer with an Evil-Genius-Attacks-The-World-With-Advanced-Technology should consider hiring Mark Tilden as a voice coach. Tilden projects in conversation a high level of self-assuredness and technical competence, pitched at a near-monotone that would lull a foe into gladly throwing himself out a twentieth-story window, if only because Mark has convinced him that, indeed, the air currents outside flow in a fashion that would gently ease the defenestrated opponent down to the ground, feather-soft.
We are fortunate that Tilden is on the side of niceness, instead of evil. His genius, on the other hand, cannot be understated.
Eight years ago, Mark Tilden worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico as a research scientist and self-titled “robobiologist.” Today he is a consultant and one of the primary designers behind a string of successful products from WowWee Toys that include RoboSapiens, RoboSaurus, RoboPet and RoboQuad. Another unit, not sold in North American stores but available directly online from the company, is called RoboBoa — more on that, later.
Robot Evolution
Despite obvious outward differences, the WowWee robots have several things in common: they have a wide array of functional movements and sounds; they’re very well constructed; and, perhaps most importantly, they’re relatively inexpensive when considering their level of sophistication.
“Ninety-eight percent of all species don’t even have a brain to speak of,” Tilden said in a Smithsonian magazine article. “Neither do my creatures. They think the way the body thinks, and for most living things, the body is everything.” When they’re given a purpose, such as seeking light, he explains, they try to accomplish that purpose any way they can. To illustrate, he grabs an insectlike robot in mid-stride, yanks a couple of its four wiry legs completely out of shape, and sets it down again. The mangled robot keeps going, dragging itself forward on its bent stumps and two good legs — looking painfully like a big grasshopper that some kid has tortured.
In another demonstration, a solar-powered walking robot, turned loose in a field behind the lab, gets through the grass and ditches, the stones taller than itself, and the weeds snagging its antennae, without any programming from Tilden. “The machine has a natural ability by itself,” he says. “If it was a digital machine, I would have to program in every possible condition based upon the environment.”
Tilden was demonstrating, at the time, an architecture for a robot brain based on a simple arrangement of transistors wired together in a loop connected to motors and sensors. Within the core of the circuit, the transistors are oscillating. A loop of oscillators emphasizing the chaotic elements of electrical signals would create a “nervous net.” A robot’s different walking behaviors could then result from different rhythms, as the oscillations fall into sync.
The concept was carried over to the first toys Tilden developed for WowWee Toys after leaving Los Alamos a few years later, and has been the basis for all the company’s robots since then. Today, Tilden designs the analog data that are a robot’s control signals, then sends the analog data to engineers he employs in China and tells them, “Do it like this.” The signals are copied and applied to a...
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