Question: how lond does it take to build a robot and where did u get this idea ?

Conor McGinn answered on 27 Feb 2016:

Hi,
Really great question.
Firstly I don’t know where exactly I got the idea to make robots in the first place. Maybe from tv? I loved the transformers cartoons when I was growing up… However I know exactly when I decided I wanted to build robots for a career. I was a second year college student and I hadn’t yet been particularly excited by anything I had been exposed to. Until one day I read that a bunch of people were working on robots that could play soccer. It was their dream that someday these robots would play and defeat the world cup winning human soccer team. When I read this I thought “Holy sh*t!!! This is what engineering should be!”. From then on, I was hooked.

You can build a robot really fast actually. There are plenty of kits available that teach you how to build simple robots. These are really great for learning the basics. If you want me to link you to a few, please let me know and I’d be happy to pass on some links.
I started with a simple kit. Then my imagination got the better of me and I started trying to build super advanced robots. These robots were much too advanced for what I was capable of. I failed spectacularly on many occasions. However although the robots often didn’t work, I loved designing them and I learnt SO much. In sport they say you learn more when you lose than when you win because when you lose you examine everything you did in detail. I would say the same is true when building robots. When my robots didn’t work (and even today when they don’t work the way I want them too), I try and understand why, and what I need to do next time so that it works. If your inventions work the way you want them to first time, then you are probably not designing something very complicated.