In our younger days, often we hope that parents or other family members buy us things we want, or even surprise us with things we didn't know we wanted (but end up loving), sometimes because of a special holiday or event. But as adults who are working and earning enough to buy little "unnecessary" things now and then, that responsibility mostly moves to ourselves.
I have a large number of hobbies, but at the same time am relatively conservative about what I buy. I try to only buy things I'll really get my money's worth, whether it is a gadget I use again and again, or something more intangible like a trip afar that brings new experiences and emotions.
It had been some time since I bought myself something special, and I was starting to think about different options. Being into gaming, a new gaming PC or laptop would be nice, though the one I bought a few years ago still works fine, especially since I am not super picky about playing games on the highest settings. I love musical instruments, but honestly I already have enough to last a lifetime, and any purely software purchase is going to keep me on the monitor 100%, which is something I am trying to get away from.
At some point the idea of buying a robot came to mind. As a result of this line of thought, my longtime passion in robots slowly resurfaced. I've been obsessed with Japanese culture for a long time, and robots are a big part of that (Ghost in the Shell, giant robots, etc.). I even took a robotics course in college (University of Florida) where I built a few robots that communicated to one another, and even danced back and forth in unison. But one of my biggest interests over the years has been Sony's Aibo, a Japanese robot dog that always seemed too expensive to purchase.
Earlier in the year I discovered the magic of using Claude for coding, which even to this day feels like a miracle technology. I soon started tackling a bunch of hobby projects in my evening and weekend hours, from educational websites to simple games, though nothing has gotten much traction yet. I have been coding since I was very young and am fairly comfortable with it, and even though I enjoy coding, I enjoy the act of creation even more, which is something Claude helps with amazingly.
Recently I realized that even though Claude can do some wonderful things, there are limitations to what can be done on a computer. Or perhaps a better way to phrase it is to say that the possibilities Claude provides when using other types of hardware is virtually limitless. Of course I am talking about robots here, loosely defined as some collection of brains, sensors, and actuators that can interact with the environment more deeply than just showing an image or making a sound. This doesn't mean Claude is literally running on the robot, but rather part of the loop of programming and debugging.
I feel like to a certain degree the software side is what has held robotics back (though of course things like servos and especially batteries can always get better than cheaper), and strong AI agents like Claude seem like they might help accelerate evolving certain areas of robotics. If nothing else, it opens up robot development to a much larger audience.
I don't remember exactly my desires in my college days, but I think back then I wanted to purse a career in robots. For better or worse I ended up getting a handful of great jobs over the years, but none had any connection to robots. I think breaking into that field late in my career is probably challenging, but still I would like to start gaining hobby experience. Who knows, maybe a few years from now I'll be a robot researcher.
Even though Aibo was re-released a few years ago, and I could probably save up enough to buy the cute dog, the programmability and speed of movement is somewhat disappointing. So I decided to do some research of available robots, including 4-legged dogs and wheeled rovers that were programmable. Claude was utilized to speed things up, but it still involved a lot of reading and double checking things.
I ended up making a few web pages so I could more easily read the results, and after a few days I realized that I might as well make my robot research public and share with other people out there. While surely there are countless robot-related sites out there, I at least had some experience with robots, no small amount of passion, not to mention some ideas for interesting ideas than simply displaying facts about robots.
Shortly after, "Dreaming of Robots" was born, the site you see before you now. Besides having a catalogue of over 600 robots, there is information on robot parts (including detailed pages on servos and Raspberry Pi models), a glossary, info on robot stores, advanced search via tags, comparison pages, and even a 'robot finder' that helps you find a robot based on a series of questions. As many people like to build robots instead of buying them pre-made, I added a DIY section with robot blueprints. There are other features like "I want this" and basic reviews. I even have some experimental 2d comparison graphs to view the various constellations of robots.
After creating all the above, I realized that the site needs some personality. I happen to have many years of experience blogging, so I thought it would be a good way to talk about robots. (By the way, all the text in this blog will be human-written unless otherwise stated.)
While searching for a robot gift for myself, I happened to find an old robot in my garage that was surprisingly capable, and have been doing some really cool experiments with that over the last week. Once I make some more progress I'll do a detailed writeup on it.
Thanks for reading, and keep dreaming of robots!
—J.D. Wisgo