Fancy building yourself a cheeky robot out of a potato? Maybe an old tin can or anything else you can find around your house?
Well, one project has just launched on Kickstarter that we think you’ll be scrambling to get your hands on.
The Smartibot isn’t just another DIY robot. It’s an AI machine that can turn into a robot with just the assistance of a cardboard outer shell, or anything else you might want to create it from.
It works by hooking up to your smartphone as the robot’s brain, or you can use it instead to control the bot from afar – the choice is yours.
Smartibot integrates a smart AI engine called YOLO (yep, it’s certainly aimed at the youngsters), which can recognise objects, including people, pets and obstacles that may stand in its way.
The robot is so smart, you don’t need any advanced programming knowledge to get it to follow you or your pet around, race a toy car or anything else it can identify.
Smartibot standard robot shell also ships with a few other cardboard disguises. One, called Teabot, includes a built-in tea tray for bringing you a cuppa in the morning, while the other, Unicorn, will turn your robot into a unicorn.
If you do want to make a robot out of another household item such as a potato or can of beans, you can just dismount the circuit board, motors and battery box and attach them to your object to make something completely new.
“We’ve designed Smartibot to enable you to build robots that are as complex as you want,,” the company explained. “You can connect up to 14 motors (4 DC ones and 10 servos) so you can build wheeled robots, two legged robots, four legged robots, robot arms, not to mention cars, trikes, hovercraft, airboats, probably even aeroplanes (though we’ve not tried that yet but excited to see what you come up with!).”
