The other week my daughter and I were lucky enough to be given a "Marty the Robot" from robotical.io as a gift from a friend who'd bought a whole load of them when they were still a crowd funded project. The robot has 3 servos in each leg and walks by leaning over and lifting the leg around. It's a peculiar gate but definitely real walking. The control board can sense motor current as well as having standard control over the servos so it can do basic sensing with its arms and feet. There's also an accelerometer in the control board so it can tell if it is falling over. The box folds out to be a football pitch and there's a pingpong ball included to be used as a ball. However if you want to play football you'll need to add your own Raspberry Pi (or equivalent) and camera as well as being pretty smart at coding.
Build
The build is fairly straight forward, unless you've built a lot of meccano from those old kits where they just show an exploded diagram it's worth looking at the extended version of the build instructions online. Mostly my 6 year old daughter did the build with some guidance from me. It took a few hours to complete the build, some of the steps are a bit fiddly and a second pair of hands can come in handy. Tweezers were suggested but even for the M2 nuts and bolts we found fingers worked better.
Play / Program
Out of the box, Marty does not do that much, after connecting him/her to your wifi you need to do some programming. Luckily Robotical have done some of the hard work for you so they've created some blocks to use in Scratch and an API to use in Python. These can access all of the motors, the onboard sensors and additional GPIO. The "Rick" brain board also supports R.O.S so you can hook it up to other systems.
Expand
As mentioned there's some additional GPIO on the board but no spare servo drivers. In the box comes a simple micro-switch that can be attached to one of the feet and the Scratch blocks can sense the values. There's also an I2C bus and a UART which can be used with a link cable provided to attach to a Raspberry Pi. We've not tried any of that out just yet as we are still familiarising with the programming and robot.
Conclusion
There is a lot in the kit and it is well made. It is a great way to get into programming robotics with a waling robot and the kit should provide a good experience for most technically minded people. At £150 there are cheaper ways to get your kid learning coding but I think it's actually good value for money. There are other programmable robots out there. Both meccano and lego have them but neither of them actually walk. There's also the Alpha 1S Robot which does truly walk but is about twice the cost at £300.
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