Rags to Robots

Willow Garage's PR1&2, Aldebaran's NAO and Pepper, Anki's Vector and Cozmo, Mayfield Robotics's Kuri, Breazeal's Jibo, Embodied's Moxie…

The downfall of these companies is enough to bring anyone who cares about sieging Deepmind's data centers with robots to tears.

Robots find themselves rising in the dramas of capitalism, and falling, when they do, into the trash. Emotional robots for children, rather aptly, tend to have the saddest and most inevitable corporate-tragedy type deaths. My popcorn is ready to watch the next whole hearted venture capital dumpster-fire tearjerker.

This project began with our work on event sourcing based flecs snapshot history, which was itself inspired by AlphaZero style MCTS rollout and converstations about the future of advanced NPCs in video games.

Rags to Robots is a poverty-to-policy game with honest physics. It's about bootstrapping a bipedal robot into an RPG protagonist with whatever you can walk to and get your jumbo clothespin clamped around.