Animated Robotic RoboRaptors Roar

One way of developing robots is to model our own history, the history of natural selection. A group publishing at Robo-Community has constructed a series of robots based on dinosaur or human models. There is even a cool photograph of reptiles massed to attack.

If one follows the series of photographs, one can compare the construction of robots to earlier craft communities or even film modelling. First the concept is drafted, the materials prepared, the model constructed and the final robot tested to ensure that the project has achieved its objective. Is it me or is there a lineage with earlier animatronic models and animation?