Bryan Bergeron - Androids: Build Your Own Lifelike Robots

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This book is dedicated to all the children who take things apart and all those who grew up to invent and create.

Special thanks to Dianne Talbot and all parents who tolerated their childrens inventive behaviors.

Special thanks, too, to Adam Wyatt for his android photography.

Bryan Bergeron, MD is author of two dozen books and 500+ magazine articles, holds several patents in the areas of human simulation and embedded systems, and is Editor-in-Chief of SERVO Magazine and Nuts & Volts Magazine. He has designed and built human simulators for academia, the military, and commercial markets. His previous book for McGraw-Hill was Teardowns: Learn How Electronics Work by Taking Them Apart (2010).

Thomas B. Talbot, MD is the creator of several systems for training medics and healthcare professionals, and founded the medical simulation research and development program at the U.S. Defense Department. The author of numerous articles and book chapters, he is currently creating logical and emotionally expressive artificial intelligencedriven virtual humans for medical education.

Androids: Build Your Own Lifelike Robots takes a unique, fun approach to learning about embedded systems, robotics, and electronics by using the human body as the focus of discussion. Sure, robotic crawlers and carpet roamers are cool platforms for experimentation, but most are cold, lifeless creations that are hard for people to relate to. Humans, in contrast, have complex reflexes, from hearts that beat at different rates based on stress to pupils that adjust to ambient light levels. If you want to take the first step in making your robots closer to humans, then this book is for you.

The inspiration for this book stems in part from the vision of great science fiction writers and in part from our experience developing human cybernetic systems for saving real human lives. If youve seen Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Terminator, Prometheus, or Doctor Who, then you know that the pinnacle of robotics isnt simply a thinking tin can, regardless of intelligence. The androids featured in these and other sci-fi classics not only pass the Turing test, but they are also physiologically correctthey breathe, bleed, and sweat as we do. As a result, short of surgical exploration, these machines are indistinguishable from humans.

The second, more immediate and practical inspiration from this book reflects the need for lifelike human surrogates to train healthcare professionals on how to save lives and treat real patients. Our experience with available surrogates has taught us that were simply not there yet. Most of these systems are little more than storefront mannequins with a few sensors. Whats needed is a cohort of eager, enthusiastic engineers, experimentalists, and inventors to create the next generation of human surrogates. We hope that this book represents the first step in that journey for you. Even if your ultimate goal is to create an android companion worthy of Blade Runner, in the meantime, youll need a challenging day job to pay the bills. Designing human cybernetic systems that can help to save lives is a great place to start.