Dizzy – an aware kind of robot

Dizzy – an aware kind of robot…

It’s difficult to approach Dizzy without him becoming aware of it. And he’ll let you know he saw you by `talking’ to you, in a way that seems to convey emotion. If you move about, he will join the action by exploring his `terrarium’. When he gets hungry, he goes to his feeding point to have a lunch brake of an hour or so. While eating, he continues to react verbally to motion around him.

Dizzy has five different sensors, which are used to sense obstacles, battery voltage, charge, modulated infrared, light and darkness, motion around him and his own motion – he is my first small `bot which really always knows when he is stuck or being picked up.

Dizzy’s closest animal example might be the horseshoe crab (called `foil crab’ in Dutch). He appears to fence with obstacles in his path. If one of his foil-like feelers touches an obstacle, Dizzy retreats from it without reversing his motors…