A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics

“It was just endless exploration of picking stuff up and moving it around and even just watching it move. It was mesmerizing to me. I felt like I really owned my own little robot,” he recalls. “I cherish this thing. I still have it to this day, and it’s still working.” The Armatron on the cover of the November/December 1982 issue of Robotics Age magazine. PUBLIC DOMAIN Today, Paulos builds robots and teaches his students how to build their own. He challenges them to solve problems within constraints, such as building with cardboard or Play-Doh; he believes the restrictions facing Watanabe and his team ultimately forced them to be more creative in their engineering. It’s not very hard to draw connections between the Armatron—an impossibly analog robot—and highly advanced machines that are today learning to move in incredible new ways, powered by AI advancements like computer vision and reinforcement learning. Paulos sees parallels between the problems he tackled as a kid with his Ar ... Read full article.