which means, I was surfing the net. Yeah, really, that is research… only it does tend to result in very easy sidetracking, and also a tendency to become overwhelmed and demoralised by the sheer amount of stuff out there about robots.

So…

I decided that I need to work out a way to immediately categorise things I find into: interesting and useful for research; interesting; and not interesting. I was thinking about this because my basic problem is that I find most things “interesting” and of course if they’re amusing then that’s even better, so I end up trying to consider, or at least feeling that I should consider, all of these things as part of my research (not a good idea)!

The decision I made was that in order to be counted as “interesting and useful for research” the robot in question (whether fictional or factual) must be capable of interacting with humans. The robot should just be given “interesting” status if it simply interacts with the world in such a way as to make humans wish that it also interacted with them.

Now, I realise that this does not help to reduce the size of my research project that well, but strangely it does seem to help with my focus. I can now see that the following are “interesting”:

Theo Jansen

The Mascarillons

While these ones are “interesting” and at least might be “useful for research”:

Autonomous Light Air Vessels (see previous post)

Orirobotics

Of course, since they’re all “interesting” they might all turn up on this blog from time to time in any case!