This week, we bring you the lovely Nick Donaldson, of GotRobots.com. Nick is often referred to as “That one guy. From RoboGames. With that monkey. The one that sits on his shoulder and high-fives people.” In any case, Nick is a brilliant inventor and robot builder and we were thrilled to have a chance to talk to him!

Intern: Thanks for taking the time to be interviewed by SuicideBots! Who the heck are you?

Nick: Nick Donaldson, roboteer extraordinaire!

Intern: How’d you get your start in robotics? What makes you a “roboteer”?

Nick: I have a background in mechanical engineering and started my career building laser optomechanical windtunnel probes. I then spent about a decade writing software for the burgeoning internet starting in the mid-90s.Then came Mindstorms! My wife Rebecca gave me one of the first Lego MS sets when they were launched. It got me started combining my love of mechanical and software into robots. I started out with a few simple Lego robots and then soon beanched out into walking robots. I found however that as they got larger and more complex the plastic flexed too much so I invested in the machine tools I needed to start building them out of aluminium, and so was born Ziggy, my first real robot, built in 2001 and still going strong. [6 times gold medal winner at RoboGames]

Nick Donaldson’s “Ziggy”

Intern: Tell me about building laser “optomechanical windtunnel probes” — what are they? How do they work?

Nick: There were two types, based on a similar technology – laser velocimeters took a single coherent laser beam, separated it into two, then refocused the two beams down to intersect in a very small volume where they interfered with each other to form light and dark fringes. As a smoke particle passed through this volume it would flash as it passed through the fringes. By measuring the frequency of flashing you could calculate velocity orthogonal to the fringes. Thus, by using three different wavelengths of light at right angles you could get all 3 vector magnitudes and calculate the speed and direction of a particle.

Intern: So basically, it’s a super-accurate measurement of aerodynamics?

Nick: Exactly. Further processing using fourier transforms would allow for sizing of the particle also, so you’d end up with a volume of a few microns in 3d-space that you could traverse around inside a wind tunnel (through a window), and so build up a detailed picture of the flow around a wing or car or whatever. Through this work, I got to design and install systems at NASA Ames in Mountain View. They have some seriously HUGE wind tunnels – big enough for a full size jumbo jet! Very cool stuff.

Intern: What were some of your very first robots like, as compared to Flik, your walking LEGO bot, and Ziggy, your walking aluminum bot?

Flik, a walking robot made of LEGO pieces

Nick: My first Lego robot was called Tobermory and was a fairly simple tracked bot with bump sensor avoidance, but extra big eyes with eyelids that would react to a bright light by squealing, closing his eyelids and backing away – kinda cute. I also built an 8 legged walker that used a rotating cam system.

Intern: How have your designs, and thoughts on robot design changed as you’ve continued to grow as a roboteer extraordinaire?

Nick: There are certain tricks that you figure out and then re-use, so as your experience grows you have more of a toolkit as it were to integrate into your designs. For instance, with the walkers I realized that if I designed the linkage mechanisms to straighten out when the foot is on the ground, no motor power is needed to keep the leg down so you rbatteries last longer. Since I figured that out, every walker I have built uses it. I even redesigned Flik (the LEGO hexapod) to use it.

Intern: Very cool! So what are you working on these days?

Nick: I have been working to commercialise the shoulder sitting monkey (Cheeky Monkey) as a toy.

Intern: What’s the Cheeky Monkey?

Nick: Cheeky Monkey is your shoulder-sitting buddy, he’s a small animatronic monkey that attaches to your shoulder and has a life of his own. He looks around, waves, scratches his ear, and you can also send him commands to high five your friends or wave at people! I originally built him for fun but had such a huge reaction any time I took him out in public that I decided to redesign the mechanism using just two tiny motors plus a bunch of cams. We are now in the final stages of bringing it out as a toy. It will be coming out this summer for about $25. I have been working closely with manufacturing in China to get the final details right.

Intern: Very cool! What else have you been working on recently?

Nick: Well, I am also designing robots professionally – over the summer last year I designed a very animated robotic head for Meka Robotics in San Francisco.

Nick: I am now working on a Nurse’s assistant; a robot to lift patients out of bed and onto a gurney.

Intern: Wow- that sounds like it would require a lot of engineering to work reliably, painlessly, and unobtrusively. How much can you share about the strategy of making that machine work?

Nick: It is surprisingly hard to build a machine strong enough to lift a human – we’re heavy! Some very expensive technology is needed; we’re using harmonic drives as the heavy lifting workhorses, since they’re perfectly suited to high-end robotics.But very expensive. We are also using Series Elastic Actuators to allow the robot to feel it’s environment – it can react to force, not just to positional information, which is important in a dynamic environment where a human may wander into the path of the robot.

Intern: That’s awesome! Thanks again for the interview! Any last words?

Nick: My army of robotic monkeys will take over the world! Mwah-hah-hah-hah!!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 7:39 pm and is filed under BotLight, Cool Robot of the Week, Neat Stuff, Robot Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.