Great story today on GigaOM about French iOS developers Pheromone Labs, who figured out a brilliant way of testing a stop-motion iPad app that they are in the process of developing, by building a LEGO robot to carry out all the grunt work. The app needed to be stress-tested by having it take 10,000 photos, but of course that would have been somewhat monotonous, not to mention time-consuming, for a human to do, and would most likely have resulted in some sort of repetitive strain injury, so instead they built a cute little robot made out of LEGO and put the little chap to work. Pheromone Labs’ Mathieu Savage says that they built the robot using a LEGO RCX kit from the 1990s, and put two styli on the end of a pair of gears so that the robot could then take a photo, preview it and do the same all over again. And again and again! Very cool!

Source: Need to stress test an iPad app? Build a LEGO robot! — Apple News, Tips and Reviews

Clever, but I think it's a s-t-r-e-t-c-h to call it a robot...

What else would you call it?

-t

Originally Posted by thewitt

What else would you call it?

-t

That's pretty much what my wife said, but I think, in today's world, a robot is more complex. If that's a robot, a copier is, as well.

Look up the definition of Helper Robot. That is exactly what this is, doing a repetitive, menial task...

As someone with a minor in robotics, I can assure you this is definitely a robot. We teach robotic concepts with these Lego kits by the way.

-g

I had no idea that robots had been around for so long. That definition makes almost any machine a robot.

I taught a class in robotics in 1977...

We programmed robots in FORTH and were state of the art...

One could easily argue that the first known robot was a mechanical bird from 350BC

The first industrial robots went into production in the 1960s for GM

-t

Cool, I'll show this to my little cousin who wastes his time building houses with Lego, throwing it up in the air and rebuilding. He is missing out haha.