These guys are all engineers who are employed by Dyson. They’re holding remote control creations made from Dyson parts. This time around the object of the challenge was to build a bot based on a the Dyson ball and race it through an obstacle course.
This sort of thing is right up our alley, but unlike the last time Dyson engineers shrugged off the daily grind to hack their own hardware, this doesn’t show off nearly enough of the festivities. Sure the pair of videos embedded after the break make a great trailer for the event, but we would love to have seen 90 seconds devoted to each of the entries. Alas, you do get to see most of the winning unit’s obstacle course run which includes a distance route, navigating through rough terrain, and negotiating a high path where falling off the edge is a real threat.
Maybe the engineers themselves will post details about their own builds like the contestants in Sparkfun’s autonomous vehicle contest do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhIC-sCJOG8
[Thanks Jude via Design Spark]
BALLS!
OF FIRE!
And they did it with no loss of suction and without blades ;)
In my observation of the company, a Dyson engineer probably spends a lot of time with a thesaurus generating synergy and upward streaming revenues without breaking Doritos patents. Man, that would be rough.
It’s like robot wars with vacuum cleaners.
Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing.
Robot wars generally had about as much to do with robotics as a remote control car does.
To me it’s like dressing oneself in cardboard boxes and shuffling around while saying beep beep boop boop I..am..a..ro..bot.
There should have been a requirement for some sort of autonomy, even if it’s minimal, any sort of decision making takes it out of the RC car world and into the robot classification.
Dyson, the company whos founder thinks patent IP should be tightened further and who robustly protects their so-called innovation – a bagless vacuum cleaner – from being copied, when cyclonic dust seperation has been around for decades. As has the ‘bladeless fan’, invented in the 1920s!
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/apple-wins-but-inventors-still-lose-dyson-20120911-25p29.html
Im still wondering when dyson starts manufactoring ‘fanless’ computer cases with airflow optimisation
They lose suction.. thats a pr lie.
I have to say Dyson RC Ball, not robot. Agree with James above, this may be amusing but not a robot due to the lack of autonomy.
As a UK engineering success and “very nearly broke” to one of the worlds most respected, STFU haterz!