Somewhat inspired by this thread about hacking furbies. I’ve seen various robotic toys modeled after dinosaurs, some of which appear to have fairly sophisticated electronics compared to furbies, and I got to thinking: Suppose I built a good sized robot body out of metal, with motors powerful enough to move the thing, could I simply rip the electronics out of one of those toys and use them to control the thing? Seems to me that it’d be a cheap way to build an army to aid my plans for world domination if it worked.
You would probably find yourself looking into components used in the R/C world (remote control hobbyist).
R/C equipment, such as servos, receivers and transmitters would take over the heavy duty tasks, such as moving limbs.
Many ‘toys’ are what hobbyists call ‘solid state’ – they have one master circuit board and you cannot take them apart and use them on an ad hoc basis. Individual components have little value, strength or flexibility (no universal mounting points, etc)
You might want to read about the career of the guy on Myth Busters (the bald guy, top designer…name escapes me). That would shed some light on your evil plans to build machines to take over the universe…for one meeeellion dollars – I mean…one Beeeeellion dollars. He uses hobby-grade R/C equipment (servos, transmitters, receivers, batteries, etc).
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Maybe, but you are looking at a ton of modifications. Judging by this question, no offense intended, modifications that are well beyond your skill level.
Even if you scaled up the engineering the electronics would not cope.
The main problem is that unlike an organic body, the Robo-unit (I assume we are talking about a robosapien/roboraptor) has hardwired control circuits that are tuned to the mass/momentum (in an inertial sense) relationships.
Humans and animals have an adaptable neural network to cope with changes, but it does take time - the proverbial gawky teenager is having to reprogram their brain to adjust to a growing body, and sometimes the body grows faster than the mind. Animals can adapt to losing limbs and other damage.
However, Robo-units have some hardwired analogue feedback circuits for movement that (while very clever and smooth) probably won’t adapt to large-scale world-dominating engineering. Processor based control systems tend to micromanage motion, and seems (to me) to be less adaptable. Until the AI programmers manage to develop a goal-oriented self programming network that is flexible and mimics the animal motion control system, robot motion will be an issue.
And I do know that some experiments along the machine self-adaption line have been done, but there is a way to go.
Si
None taken. I could certainly figure out how to reroute power wires so that the thing could run off a car battery (since a couple of D batteries ain’t gonna do it), but reprogramming electronics is beyond my ken. I don’t know how the things are put together, so I didn’t know if leg movements were controled by microswitches, or if the chips are programmed to just move the limb for 2 milliseconds (or whatever) in one direction, than 2 milliseconds in another. Though, I’d think that you might even be able to work with that, if you had motors that moved faster than the ones in the toy, but I could be wrong.