A: Roboy has its roots in the Cronos project (www.cronosproject.net) which preceded the eccerobot (www.eccerobot.org) project. The basic idea in all these projets was to create a system that mimics the muscoloskeletal system of the (in this case) human body. The rationale is that in order to understand how a system really works, you need to be able to build it. Only then you’ll know for sure that you understood all the relevant parts.

A: Right now, roboy is a messenger for a technology and field of research. Roboy advertises the idea that to study the dynamics of a human body it makes sense to try to build one. In the near future, we will further develop roboy into a more modular system, where interested research laboratories can buy the parts of roboy that they require for their studies. (Say the legs for walking, an arm for manipulation or to study the complex dynamics of the shoulder) This will make him interesting for fields like bio mechanics, motor learning, physiology and control.

Furthermore, the fact that roboy is a full humanoid – as opposed to say just an arm – allows for even more applications, be it in research fields such as human-robotics-interaction and psychology or even outside research. We see roboy as a platform for culture and education as well. E.g. when roboy was developed a theater play introducing him to the world was developed as well and there was also an improvised theatre and dance session in Beijing – both with great success. We’re currently also working with teachers to create a “Roboy at school” day, where roboy visits a school and teaches the children about robotics and their anatomy – with a hands on build-your-own-robot competition as well.

A: Building a system as complex as roboy in only 9 months is a huge challenge. Even more so, as financing had to be done along the way. Also, with such a small amount of time, you will need to stick to the solution that you expect to work and there’s not much space for experiments. Luckily we had very professional partners with a lot of experience.  We tried to use crowd funding to get the money for roboy but it turned out difficult despite the huge media attention we had. So in the end, while crowd funding contributed its part the large part of the money and work came through the industrial partners.

A: Definitely the positive reactions. Roboy is a research project and as such interaction with the public is often difficult, because one has to break down complex topics into bits people can understand.