The Overpowerdorable Teddy Bear Herder

The hilarious power of weaponized hugs.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little perturbed by the whole ‘police killing people who don’t need to be killed’ thing. I’m also tired of the same old arguments over and over that involve mild improvements to a broken idea.

So obviously we’re going to propose something new.

Let’s start by talking about some lesser ideas.

Yes, yes, I know. Automated police-bots can help us fight criminals, but aren’t we talking about more than a little bit of overkill, here? Why are even thinking in that direction?

At the very least, we could go with something that actually has an inherent advantage, right?

Seriously, why do we have to keep escalating?

And that’s got to get you thinking… what about a swarm?

Here’s a clip that might get the brain heading in a different direction

…that Robot Herder was pretty overpowered, wasn’t he? They pretty much had to go out of their way to make sure that everyone else wasn’t completely unnecessary. In most situations you’d just a bunch of the little guys in.

But if you’ve got something overpowered, maybe you don’t have to be so lethal? What if you made a variant that was small…but harmless? What if instead of shooting things at you it just grappled with you until you chilled out? That’d be better than getting shot, right?

It wouldn’t have to be terribly accurate or graceful, it could actually get away with being pretty clumsy, right? Especially if you had a lot of them.

Sure, it’s future tech, but it’s tech that should be on the timeline way before some weird killer robot dystopia, and it instantly makes that future irrelevant.

Visualize the little robots from Vexille, except as little robots with breathable fabric, extendable arms and legs, and maybe little electromagnets at the ends of their arms and legs they could use to grip each other.

How do you defend against that?

You really can’t, can you?

Well, you can run.

But it’s not like they can’t be launched in front of you.

So, how do we make these little things, and what else can we do with them? Can we create a future without robot police that can accidentally kill us?

Let’s start from the beginning.

Yes. Yes we can. It’ll take some refinement and work to get some fancier bits incorporated, but we’ve got enough for the basic prototype. We’d need LOTS of them to start with and a launching mechanism, but the better we get the less we need.

So, let’s talk about some basic design. Imagine your typical teddy bear robot…

• The legs and arms need to extend when activated
• The motion should include springy and climbing maneuvers for complex terrain (including swarming over each other)
• The body contains a gas canister that prevents accidental suffocation for the parts of the robots that aren’t porous.
• The robot should be well padded, soft, and contain as few hard parts as possible (more fishing line muscle, less metals)
• Some mechanism for clasping to each other (electromagnets perhaps?) needs to be incorporated.
• Coordinated movement should be organized via a combination of local data and Herder instructions.
• Some should have extra large air tanks and large displays (we’ll get to that bit)

As for what you control them from…oh… I don’t know…

They really don’t have to make an appearance right away, do they? So they can always hang back and do all this remotely, but I like to think they’d have some fun with it

Now that we’ve revolutionized law enforcement by weaponizing hugs, what else can we do?

Well, right off the bat…

• They can be used as gas masks
• With the ones with displays, they can be a portable self-assembling positive pressure containment suit for airborne pathogen outbreaks
• They can wrap around injured body parts
• They can lessen the damaging from falls and collapses
• They can hug sad people

Right there I think we have a few reason to seed schools and public places with lots of these (and the fact that now they could already be surrounding you waiting for the Herder to activate is all kinds of fun!)

I say from there we just go full bore with the robotic assistant route. Things like…

• Educational and psychologically supportive features for children.
• Health monitoring and maintenance (everything from tests to being your med-for-the-day machine)
• A modifiable voice attached to a Siri-type interface to provide your basic administrative needs in a far more endearing casing

And so on.

I know it’s a slightly silly seeming dream, but I think it’s a good one. What can it hurt to try? After all, accidentally activating a Teddy Bear is likely to result in a hugging.

How’re those guns working out for us again?