TyroBot: A Simple Biped with a Touchscreen Interface
Walking robots can be lots of fun, but as you reduce the number of legs down to two, walking becomes quite difficult, as the ‘bot will need to intermittently balance on one foot. One novel solution is to make the feet big enough so that the robot can simply rock back and forth without complicated balancing routines, rotating the leg that comes off of the ground forward. Makers have come up with many interesting iterations of this concept, including TyroBot, which features a 2.8" touchscreen as a face, as well as servo-actuated arms, and a moveable head.

The robot — now on Kickstarter — is powered by the Tyro Board, a custom robotics controller, based around Microchip’s 32-bit ATSAMD21 microcontroller, and simple movement routines can be programmed via the TFT display. Additionally, the board is equipped with a three-axis accelerometer and an ESP8266 WiFi module for wireless connectivity. This means that, as seen in its Kickstarter video, you could have it tweet for help when it falls down, and a built-in expansion port opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities.

The device is available as a DIY kit, which gives you the components needed to build it without the 3D-printed parts, or for $10 more, you get everything needed to build it. It can be assembled with a screwdriver in a couple of hours.


