#microbot

[stevebattle]

Squirt (1987) by Anita Flynn and Rodney Brooks, MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA. Squirt is said to be “The World's Largest One Cubic Inch Robot”, incorporating an 8-bit computer, an on-board power supply, three sensors and a propulsion system in a tiny package a tad over 1 cubic inch in volume. It hides in dark comers, venturing out in the direction of noises, but only after the noises are long gone, looking for a new place to hide. “We have noticed from engineering all our previous robots that the bulk of most robots is made up of motors and batteries, whereas the components wherein we focus our research, the sensors and computers, take up only a small amount of space. We built Squirt as an exercise in shrinking brawn down to the scale of the brain using strictly off the shelf components. The design goal was a final volume of one cubic inch, but Squirt came in a little over spec, about 1 1/4 cubic inches, hence the accolade.” – Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System by Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn.

[afrotumble]

[digitalinterfacer]

NIBBLE, the microbot bug (dic.2023)

[saxandviolins88]

Perrrrrrrcy!!!

Messing around with a Perceptor design that turns into a conventional microscope; dunno if I'll gonna stick with it tho

Also box art colors bc I'm crazy like that

[wanderersrest]

An Abbreviated History of Mecha Part 2: AWAKEN! SUPER ROBOT!!! (1970-1979)

(Read in the voice of Tessho Genda) ITS NAME IS.... MAZINGER.... Z!!!!!!!!!

Welcome back to An Abbreviated History of Mecha. Last time, we covered the origins of mecha by highlighting some of the major works of the time including Godzilla and Ultraman, which are not really mecha but are just as influential to the genre as the other shows mentioned.

Today, we will be moving on to the 70's. Here we will see three extremely iconic entries to the canon make their grand entrances, known to Super Robot Wars fans as the Holy Trinity. We'll also see a lot of the classic mecha tropes become codified with a lot of these entries. So, let's MAZIIIN GO!

Kamen Rider (1971)

Kamen Rider is the second iconic series created by mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori and would be part of the reason why henshin heroes (that is, heroes who transform) would become so popular. More importantly, Kamen Rider would give us one of the most homaged attacks of all time: the Rider Kick! And in case you're wondering, yes, Ishinomori still has one more series worth mentioning.

Kamen Rider, alongside Godzilla and Ultraman, got a 2023 retelling in the form of Shin Kamen Rider, courtesy of Hideaki Anno.

Mazinger Z (1973)

Mazinger Z is one of the many iconic series created by legendary mangaka Go Nagai. If Tetsujin 28 was the original "super robot", Mazinger Z would be the series that would introduce a lot of the tropes now commonly associated with a lot of giant robot anime, including but not limited to:

A robot that has to be piloted from the inside

A chest blaster

Laser eyes

Hot-blooded pilots

The term "super robot"

And most important of all, the rocket punch

Let's just say that there's a good reason why Mazinger Z (and this is just Mazinger Z) is the first of the three pillars of the Holy Trinity. Mazinger also has, in terms of sequels and adaptations:

Great Mazinger

UFO Robot Grendizer

Mazinkaiser

Shin Mazinger Z/Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact

Mazinger Z Infinity

Getter Robo (1974)

Created by Ken Ishikawa with help from Go Nagai, Getter Robo would be the second pillar of the Holy Trinity alongside Mazinger Z. Getter Robo would be important for introducing concepts such as a robot piloted by multiple people and, more importantly, Getter Robo would also introduce us to the combining robot, which is why it requires multiple pilots to man.

Getter Robo would get multiple sequels and spinoffs including, but not limited to:

Getter Robo G

Getter Robo Go

Shin Getter Robo Armageddon!

Shin Getter Robo vs Getter Robo Go

New Getter Robo (not to be confused with Shin Getter Robo)

Getter Robo Devolution

Eventually Ken Ishikawa would pass away before he could wrap up the series with Getter Robo Arc. I will come back to Getter Robo at some point in this series though, but to give you a hint: the series does get a conclusion.

I think I'd also be mistaken not to link to Cheese GX's excellent video retrospective on Getter Robo.

Super Sentai (1975)

Because Shotaro Ishinomori wasn't content with creating two iconic series, he went ahead and made a third: Super Sentai. That's right: Ishinomori created the two most iconic versions of the henshin hero. Super Sentai is worth mentioning here due to the fact that the series would eventually start adding giant robots into the mix. This series would also eventually attract the attention of one Haim Saban, but that's a story for another day.

Microman/Microbots (1974)

Microman (the toy, not the wrestler) was a line of, and I'm not joking when I say this, "Tiny Little Guys" released in 1975 by the toy company Takara. I'm not super familiar with Microman, but I feel it is important to mention Microman here to understand that one of the biggest names in mecha is descended from this line of toys, as it would start out as a spinoff of microman. Something about transforming vehicles the micromen could pilot. Who could know?

Also fun fact, there's a wrestler named Microman.

Brave Raideen (1975)

(We'll have to settle with this clip from Super Robot Wars)

Brave Raideen is a series created by Studio Sunrise and is one of the first giant robots that is considered to be supernatural in origin. Raideen is important in the history of mecha as it is where two important figures would come into play: Yoshiyuki Tomino and Tadao Nagahama. While it is largely overshadowed by other bigger series, Raideen is still important due to it being the first stepping stone for those two directors alone.

Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers (1975)

Up next is Leiji Matsumoto's legendary Space Battleship Yamato. This series would be one of those watershed moments in anime history as Yamato would prove that there was, in fact, an audience who wanted more serious war stories. To say that this series isn't that influential would be a mistake, as we will soon see.

Space Battleship Yamato would eventually receive multiple adaptations, including a live-action film and an anime reboot in the new millennium. The success of Yamato would also help pave the way for other Leiji Matsumoto works like Space Pirate Captain Harlock and the Galaxy Railway 999.

The Robot Romance Trilogy (1976-1979)

(Pictured above: Voltes V)

The Robot Romance Trilogy is a thematic trilogy created by Toei and directed by Tadao Nagahama. These series would include:

Super Electromagnetic Robot Combattler V (V as in the letter)

Super Electromagnetic Robot Voltes V (V as in the number)

Fighting General Daimos

The Robot Romance Trilogy is known for building off of the innovations of its peers. Whereas Getter Robo combined by smashing three jets together (and thus was hard to translate into a toy), Combattler V was designed in a way where the parts of the robots actually made sense when combining to form the robot. This also doesn't even touch on the fact this trilogy would also help to popularize things like the five man band (alongside Super Sentai), mecha shows having more serious storylines with melodrama, and funnily enough, the motion capture mecha (specifically Daimos).

Voltes V is also extremely popular in the Philippines. While this isn't unheard of at this time, Voltes V was different in that it was banned from airing on television by the Marcos regime. Speculation behind its ban may be that its themes were similar to the plight of the Filipino people under Marcos, so you could say that Voltes V in particular is a symbol of rebellion in the Philippines. Heck, it was so popular that there now exists a live action Voltes V series filmed in the Philippines.

Zambot 3 & Daitarn 3 (1977 & 1978)

(Pictured above: Zambot 3)

Meanwhile, Yoshiyuki Tomino would continue to push boundaries as he got more into the groove of directing. On top of producing Voltes V (according to Wikipedia), Tomino would work on a few more series before the end of this decade. The first two would help to establish a pattern with Tomino's works, where he would follow up a more serious and depressing series with something more lighthearted and silly. Zambot 3 would help Tomino earn his nickname "Kill 'Em All Tomino," while Daitarn 3 would also show that he knew how to relax when working on a series. Both Zambot 3 and Daitarn 3 were big hits, but the next series would forever cement Tomino as a legendary figure in the world of anime and manga.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979)

Mobile Suit Gundam, the final pillar of the Holy Trinity, is arguably Yoshiyuki Tomino and Sunrise's single most important series date. Arguably the single most famous mecha of all time, Gundam would be the first giant robot to be treated less as a hero and more as a tool of war, and it would be Gundam who would kick off a new generation of mecha stories that focused more on things like war and how it affects the lives of the characters in these stories. Which is funny, because Gundam was initially a flop at first. Over time, the series would eventually become a hit thanks to its compilation movies as well as the sale of its models and, most important of all, its female fans.

Mobile Suit Gundam would also be a watershed moment in animation history, as it would be the introduction to a lot of people who would also become famous thanks in part to this series. This includes people who worked on the show like Yasuhiko Yoshikazu (the character designer), Kunio Okawara (mechanical designer, and arguably the first credited mechanical designer), and Ichiro Itano (animator, the same man who Itano Circus is named after). Gundam would also be a direct inspiration for one Ryousuke Takahashi, who would begin to really push the boundary for what one could do with military mecha shows.

Conclusion

I hope this was an enjoyable read. Next time, we'll be getting into the 80's, where we will begin to see a lot of series pop up as Japan's economy grows at an exponential rate. We'll also see how these giant machines will come to influence people outside of Japan on top of how they build off of the themes present in the first Gundam.

Will you survive?

[callsign-relic]

LITTLE ITTY BITTY MINIMUS🥺‼️GOSHH i think it’s really cute for him to use comms all the time.. tiny little sophisticated mech has a tiny little voice thats hard to hear even when he yells but he still gets to be authoritative and a hardass.. there should be shifts for people to carry him around in very careful hands or cupped against a shoulder, walking extra slow. rodimus might accidentally fling him away once or twice but he can shape up after

he’s so LITTLEEE but still so much bigger without the armor🥰🥰🥰 -ckg

AUGHHH YESSSS. And dude that must be so surreal for little Mimsy. His subordinates, his coworkers, his friends— larger than some of the tallest buildings on Cybertron itself, to him. So large, even the way they moved appeared slower at a distance. These monolithic bots were not just people, they were his friends.

Oh man and imagining him with Megatron like this… Megatron being the one to insist he stays without his armor, even when he’s so minuscule. It didn’t matter. The armor was a burden on Minimus, and he deserved to feel like he could be himself. Even if ‘himself’ was almost too small to notice.

Almost.

Ouugggghhh imagining Megatron leaning his gigantic face down to kiss Minimus’ tiny form as softly as he can. Barely brushing his lips against him, yet the force almost knocks Minimus over. When he pulls away, Minimus is blushing so hard he’s practically glowing.

[redwolfnik]

Would you do my art requests of the microbots breaking the caviar down in King Norman’s stomach pls?

(Norman is a titular Kenny Scharf “failed cartoon” character who is antagonistic tax collector)

I'm sorry, I forgot about it,

[xianhuashi]

Please don’t unfollow me or stop interacting, but I don’t really watch the series nor do I like the artstyle… but I won’t be a dick if you like it 👍 (also Baymax art)

[thedreadvampy]

so me and Sam FINALLY watched the last season of Capaldi's Who

and tell me how, after literally over a decade and for perhaps the first time in his fucking career, Steven Moffat wrote a not just tolerable but really actually good two-parter and fully stuck the landing. like the editing and pacing were still a bit off but the storyline was original, fun, interesting and emotionally invested, and most importantly, rather than ending on a damp fart or the most furious autofellatio in history, the final part didn't fumble it and ended in a way that felt emotionally satisfying and like it made sense for the characters. like the last time he successfully wrapped up a multiparter in a way that didn't feel cheap and hollowly disappointing to me was literally The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and a) that was in 2005 and b) tbh The Doctor Dances is about a tenth as compelling and memorable as The Empty Child.

so after 12 years of either hackery or great ideas that fall apart in the second act, Steven Moffat writes what I would genuinely consider to be a memorable Good Doctor Who serial. it ends with bittersweet pathos, a solid closer for all the main characters, and sends Moffat's showrunning career out on a genuine high despite failing ratings and budget cuts (and the fact Doctor Who hasn't been consistently good since about 2009). good job Steve. with grudging respect I admit you pulled it out of the bag on this one.

wait what's this there's one more episode left? and it stars Mark Gatiss? and you literally spend the whole episode inexplicably just shitting all over the legacy of Doctor Who by inventing a version of the First Doctor that bears literally no resemblance to the character that William Hartnell actually played, just so you can spend the whole episode saying misogynistic things to run yourself off to how much more Totally Feminist your version was than the version you made up in your head of what Doctor Who was like in the 60s? and it added literally nothing to the season except to take all the wind out of the sails of the actually good finale you already wrote?

even when he writes a good episode this fucker still finds ways to disappoint me.

[brandwhorestarscream]

We. Should talk about microbots. Bots that are the size of irl figures. The biggest ones are 12 inches tall. They're so often forgotten about and trampled over on Cybertron. Their homes are like dollhouses and they live amongst hulking giants. The world is too big for them. In this essay I will

[starscreams-mojo-dojo-casa-house]

"Get this thing off me!"

Starscream | Microbots (Season 2, Episode 18)

[stevebattle]

Ants: Anita, Sandra, Kisha, Tracie, Niqi, and Hope (1995) by James McLurkin, MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA. There were six robot ants, all with womens’ names since all worker ants are female. We see McLurkin with his ‘Ant Farm’, and before and after images of the ants foraging for ‘food’, then responding to signals from the first ant to find it. “The Ants are programmed with a subset of Brooks' Subsumption Architecture implemented in 6811 assembly language. A program for the Ants would consist of a group of behaviors, arranged in a hierarchy. … A behavior is a small piece of code that acts like a finite state machine. … This is an effective method of providing the robot with a response for every possible sensory input, without having to explicitly program for every condition. Summing the responses of many behaviors is a much easier task that looking at all of the sensory inputs and then trying to decide what to do. As a result, the robots can exhibit surprisingly complex actions with a very small amount of software. … When a robot finds food, she stops and transmits I-found-food through her IR beacon emitter. Other members in the vicinity that detect this signal head towards her, transmitting I-see-a-robot-with-food from their beacon emitters. Any robot that detects this secondary signal heads towards it until they receive the primary signal, then the head towards the first robot. In this manner, many robots can be vectored towards a large food source quickly.” – The Ants: A Community of Microrobots by James McLurkin.

[tallus76-photography]

MICROBOTS

PERCEPTOR - The heart of Cybertron must be in Megatron's chest, and we've got less than two hours to get to it.

[danieldavidreitberg]

Microscopic Medics: A Targeted Future for Drug Delivery - Daniel Reitberg

A microscopic revolution is about to happen in the field of health. Scientists have come up with a revolutionary new idea: microbots. These are tiny robots, less than a human hair, that are made to move through the bloodstream's complicated pathways. These tiny miracles hold a lot of promise for delivering drugs precisely, which could change the way we treat diseases, especially cancer.

Microbots can be programmed to send medicine directly to sick cells, which is something that is hard for most other drug delivery methods to do. This targeted method gives us a small bit of hope that one day we'll be able to only target cancer cells with chemotherapy drugs. Imagine a world where these tiny fighters protect healthy tissues from getting hurt by the virus, making the painful side effects of traditional treatment much less common. With this level of accuracy, treatment effectiveness could also be increased, which could mean better results for patients.

Microbots are a big step forward in specific drug delivery, even though they are still in the early stages of development. As more studies are done, these tiny doctors could start a new era of personalized care that makes getting better faster and easier for patients.

[callsign-relic]

Imagining Starburst somehow encountering the microbots as he’s visiting Cybertron.

Maybe due to his smaller stature, it’s easier for him to see the little guys. Watching them trek the distance across the floor, helpless as a careless mech almost crushes them underpede— and he zips by, scooping them up as he clatters to the floor in a rushed, crash landing.

The microbots all looking around, terrified and confused, staring up at the mech who held them within his claws. As best as he could, anyway.

And Star gazing down at them, breathing a deep sigh of relief. “You guys oughta be more careful, it’s dangerous out here for us little guys! Are you alright?”

Meanwhile the microbots all have to process what exactly just happened… this bot that saved them… he clearly wasn’t a megamachine, if he was sentient enough to communicate with them. Was this some sort of… giant version of one of their own bot kind?