When Silas Adekunle started raising money for his Bristol-based startup Reach Robotics, one of his first challenges was to convince people it wasn’t a crazy idea. A student in his final year, he had plans to shake up the consumer robotics industry with gaming robots called Berserker and Brute – the Mecha Monsters.
He received backing from a variety of institutions, including the Arts Council and a funding scheme called React. The University of the West of England, Adekunle’s alma mater, gave him free workspace in their robotics lab, with access to the equipment his small team of engineers need to prototype the robots. Now the company is hoping to raise $100,000 on the crowdfunding website IndieGogo.
Brute and Berserker are quadrupeds with thick, spider-like legs that allow them to stomp, swivel and jump. Their purpose, if the names don’t make it abundantly clear, is to wage war. They fire lasers at each other from shoulder-mounted cannons and block with shields. “You control them via an app on your smartphone or tablet,” says Adekunle. “It’s like a computer game controller but the battle takes place in the real world.”
And with a little programming, these robots can evolve. “You can also buy add-ons such as shields and boosters that transform the way the robot looks and performs.” It’s more than just an entertainment product, he says. “When you’re done playing with the robot, you can use our developer software to start creating custom motions. It’s a very simple way of trying out coding and seeing it play out in real life. So there’s an educational aspect to this as well.”
Adekunle says it would have been very difficult to make his Mecha Monsters five years ago. Prototyping the robots, his team has relied heavily on 3D printing: “You can test and prototype without doing a run of injection moulding that turns out to be bad and costs you thousands of pounds.”
Another factor is the ever-growing ubiquity and power of smartphones. “We’ve been able to outsource some of the processing from the robots to the devices that people carry around.” Five years ago, he probably would have had to build separate controllers for the robots; today he just needs to build an app.
So is everything easier for hardware entrepreneurs these days? “It’s still very difficult,” he says carefully, “but I think attitudes are changing. In the software market, you don’t need much money to start but it gets expensive down the line. Whereas with hardware you take a bigger risk to start with but have the potential to make more money. But it’s getting less risky in hardware now. People are starting to realise it’s an investable market where there’s a lot of money to be made.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Mecha Monsters – battling robots that can also teach you how to code
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