Socially Awkward Blimp Stalks People, Isn’t as Creepy as It Sounds

Fit Ollie, the DIY autonomous robotic Blimp. He (yes, the blimp is apparently a "he") floats happening Helium; has fluttering wings successful of wire, mylar, and servos; and he reacts to his surroundings–often socially awkwardly.

Created by Pritika Nilaratna, a user experience designer and programmer in New York, Ollie floats around and tries to get attention from mass. He is law-abiding and reacts to voices by "excitedly flapping his wings. Ollie is meant to be friendly and eager to be noticed, but also unobtrusive–you could just just push on him out of your way if he gets annoying.

In the video of Ollie below, you see that he actually kind of stalks people to induce their attention. According to Pritikia "automobile-fallible interaction has the potential to Be both writer and ubiquitous," and Ollie "is a presentment of the creative capabilities of robots as inhabitants of our society, breaking the stamp of the servile golem." In otherwise words, Ollie is meant to break the standard that we're then used to. It's definitely funny watching roughly people's responses to Ollie.

So how come you beat your own? You constitute it! Ollie is under a Creative Green Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License which means that you can copy and qualify Ollie's design so long as you give credit to the author (Pritika) and that you single deal out the resulting work under the same kind or similar license.

You can make your same own Ollie with an Arduino gameboard, some servos, a mylar billow gasbag, and some other basic electronics supplies. Pritika posted instructions for Ollie on the main Ollie site and also as an Instructables project. To learn more around Ollie run down the abstract.

[Ollie via Hackaday / Video: Pritika Nilaratna (at Vimeo)]

James IV Mulroy is well-nig definitely passing to have a socially awkward blimp…defecate sure to follow him on Twitter and on StumbleUpon to father the latest in microbe , dinosaur , and death irradiatio news .