Robotics Monday: "Terminator"-style Robotic Head

Name of Model: Talking LEGO robot skull reciting movie lines

Created by: w at thinkingbricks.com

Found at: http://thinkingbricks.com/1/terminator/terminator001.html

Details: This brilliant LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robot actually talks! It says lines from the Terminator movies. I believe that that would make it a robot from the future, and we should go with it if we want to live. There are videos, photos and quite a bit of docmentation at the site above. I'm not sure how many NXT units or motors were used to do this, but the amount of motion this head has is impressive. It's not easy to get all those angles in, either - making something like this sturdy is definitely a feat for Technic builders. Most surprising, though, is that the sound files played by the NXT programmable brick (bricks?) were recorded and programmed at the syllable level - this isn't just a simple playback of movie clips, we're actually hearing the NXT string the sound files together to simulate speech. Another neat trick - the light used are not the ones from the Educational Edition of the NXT kit - it's actually the light brick from the 4998 Stegosaurus kit. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Terminator movie franchise (they are rated R, after all), the movies are action/sci-fi flicks about a man who invents a network of robots - and the robots that travel through time to try to control him as a kid (before he builds his inventions).