Spykee is a fairly new robot by Meccano, which explains why you need to assemble it from a bunch of plastic and metal parts. AvB describes the assembly quite well on his blog.
Does Spykee actually ‘do’ anything of its own?
For me, it is a bit weird to see that somehow Meccano managed to transform the idea of a robot as a toy or a thing that ‘does stuff’ and respond in various ways to you, to a silly RC WIFI-controlled extension of the owner. The camera only relays the video to the owner, the sound is relayed, and even his master’s voice is relayed through the speakers.
It does not seem to have a voice of it’s own. I cannot even imagine facial expressions. And what of gestures? Spykee does have hands, which is an important requisite for gesturing. But they don’t do much yet, it appears. Perhaps this is where their ‘open source’ policy comes in. Maybe they expect me, or you, to program all sort of interesting gestures for Spykee. A little bit like making gestures for Second Life. Hmmm, maybe the gesture databases for Second Life could somehow be ported to Spykee?
There is an interesting comparison here between Spykee and Rovio. Rovio is even worse at gesture, since it does not even have anything that could be interpreted as hands or arms. But it does have more autonomous navigation.
