This toy was conceived as the ultimate remote controlled robot. The goals were to be able to pick up heavy objects, drive over varied terrain, shoot projectiles, and look really cool.
Design Features
Critical to the design was compliance with toy safety standards and durability requirements. The powerful articulated joints had to be designed with internal stops and appropriate clearances to avoid pinch hazards, and the structure of the robot had to be durable and resilient enough to survive drop tests onto concrete. Other important considerations were to achieve reasonable cost and to maximize battery life.
Multi-stage “wobble gears” were used for the waist and shoulder joint reduction drives to achieve very high gear ratios and high torque output from very small and inexpensive motors using only a few moving parts. Clutches were incorporated into the waist and shoulder drive trains in order to isolate and protect the gears from damage as well as to act as torque limiters on the output
The electronics and styling for this product were handled by the customer. Creative was responsible for the entire product development process, including design, engineering, prototyping, documentation, and hand-off to the production vendor.
The tank tread drive features twin motorized gearboxes using compound spur gear reduction and sliding compound gears to create two-speed transmissions. A single knob shifts both gearboxes simultaneously.
The dart shooter was developed in favor of a proposed ball shooter based on cost and the impact on battery life a ball shooter would have had: the battery would have to supply the kinetic energy to the balls. In contrast, the darts are fired by individual springs which are cocked when the user loads the darts. A low-power motorized drive merely rotates the cylinder to fire the darts. As each dart passes a trigger point during rotation, it fires.