The 1980s were great years for robot fans: from Terminators to Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, you couldn’t move for robots on cinema screens and on TV. But the most interesting robots weren’t fictional ones.
They were the ones in real laboratories, on factory floors and in many cases, on our kitchen tables or pottering around our kitchen floors. From exciting experiments to tantalising tech toys, these are the best real robots from the eighties.
Do you think RB Robotics had seen Star Wars? The cylindrical RB5X had a shape and a name awfully reminiscent of everybody’s favourite fictional robot, but there was substance to its Star Wars style: it could learn from experience, so if it bumped into things on one pass of a room it would learn not to bump into them again.
RB5X was one of the first commercial robots that could work autonomously instead of requiring instructions from an operator or programmer.
Nintendo R.O.B.
Nintendo’s ROB – Robotic Operating Buddy – was an accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System that could respond to simple commands from the console, transmitted via flashes on your TV screen.
Nintendo seemed to give up on it almost immediately, as it only ever worked with two games: as it was designed solely as a gaming accessory, it was completely pointless if you didn’t have those games. Like the Virtual Boy, it’s another example of Nintendo being way ahead of its time.
It’s Tomy time again! Omnibot was a range of robots that looked like proper robots. They had cassette decks and digital clocks so you could schedule playback or programmed movements for particular times, and they could carry small objects: Omnibot 2000 could even carry drinks.
However, Omnibot had a a fatal flaw: if you lost the remote, which was really easy to do, the entire unit was useless.
Modulus was sold as “the friend of Homo sapiens”, which didn’t sound sinister at all. Modulus was designed to be a useful home companion, but its modular design was intended to be as flexible as possible: you could add a voice synthesiser or voice recognition, infra-red sensors or different limbs.
There were three versions: the base model, a “service & security” model and the vaguely humanoid “Moddy”.
Arctec Gemini
“Gemini can help you and your children prepare for the burgeoning field of robotics,” the blurb promised. “you’re able to program the robot to tutor your children in most any subject, such as spelling, reading, history, music or math.”
That was perhaps a little optimistic for what appeared to be a Speak And Spell glued to a bin, but the Gemini was a breakthrough in personal robotics thanks to not one but three on-board computers: one for its intelligence, one for controlling movement and avoiding obstacles, and a third for text-to-speech processing that meant it could respond to commands.
Dustbot was a Roomba long before there was such a thing as a Roomba. Another Tomy robot, Dustbot was a cheerful-looking thing with a built-in vacuum cleaner – a robotic first – and edge detection so it wouldn’t fall downstairs.
By today’s standards, Dustbot is incredibly primitive, but at the time it was impossibly futuristic.
Androbot Topo
Topo was amazing, and by the standards of the day it wasn’t too expensive either. Designed primarily for educators and hobbyists, Topo was programmable via the Apple II and would move around according to its program.
It wasn’t technically a robot because it wasn’t aware of its surroundings – it didn’t have any sensors – but it was huge fun to program and there was even a version with text-to-speech that you could use to make it shout at your dad.
This is the first appearance for Tomy in our list but it won’t be the last: it made some of our favourite robotic toys, including the Armatron robot arm.
There were two versions, one of which had a wired remote control, and both were designed to resemble the industrial robots that were beginning to appear on factory floors – although unlike those robots, Armatron had no automation and merely responded to user input.
The successor to the brilliantly named Shakey, Flakey was a research robot that was used to experiment with and demonstrate fuzzy logic and goal-oriented behaviour: thanks to its 12 sonar sensors, optical wheel encoders, video camera and range-finding laser it could analyse its environment and work out multiple ways to achieve its goals.
Honda E Series
The E Series was developed well into the 1990s, and with each successive model Honda got a step closer to making a fully realised autonomous robot that could walk, climb stairs and kill all humans. Er, maybe not that last one.
The E Series’ DNA was obvious in the later, lovable ASIMO robot, but the entire project was kept secret until the early 1990s.
