Week TechVideo, 2011 #42 - Meet George

Name George seems to be actually quite popular among LEGO characters... but lets talk from another George.

About a year ago my attention was drawn by a Giant LEGO robot. It combined large scale technic building with the use of MINDSTORMS and Pneumatics. The project looked really interesting and got me thinking about the limits of Technic constructions, especially with regard to size. It is not that hard to make large solid and strong Technic structures, but the problem of this kind of structures is that they tend to get very heavy... and that is exactly what happend in this Giant LEGO robot. So much so, that for example the weight of the arms made it extremely difficult to do anything with it: motors and gears were strained to their limits with just the wieght of th arms themselves.

Even soo and despite the poor quality of the pictures, the project was a good looker and got quite some attention.

Learning his lesson from the initial complications, Burf2000, builder and programmer of the Giant LEGO robot now presents us with George. In the following video you can get a basic idea of what his robot is capable of.

The George in the video is already version 2.1 - as is natural with any construction there are some complications you don't run into until you try to do certain things with it. For the moment George is controlled by a PSP controller, using the PS2 Mindsensor wireless connector, but the project should evolve into George becoming more autonomous and possibly even having a couple of friends to interact with.

You may find additional photos from George's album, at flickr.