Watch Out

Parents were alarmed by recent reports that Robosapien II is to be launched in February, making the old model obsolete. The manufacturer insists that it will not be on sale until next Christmas, however. Tilden has hinted that it will be a female that combs its owner’s hair, gives hugs and orders its male counterpart around.

The advent of a female partner may explain why Robosapien can give wolf-whistles in a range of behaviour named “international caveman”, but whether this program will allow it to interact with “her” in other ways remains to be seen.

By rights Robosapien should have ended up on Mars, leaving children to content themselves with Fuzzy Felt sets, Bratz dolls and Scalextric Sport Digital. But fate had other plans for the machine and its creator.

Tilden, a 6ft 3in black belt, was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the son of a salesman. At the age of two he emigrated with his family to Canada. The following year he built his first robot doll from bits of wood, a feat that he surpassed three years later by constructing a Meccano suit of armour for the family cat.

“I’m a non-stop robot geek,” he said. “At one time I had 60 robots at home cleaning my house.”

After excelling at maths and science in school, Tilden graduated with a masters degree in engineering before working for Nasa. He spent 10 years trying to build robots to explore Mars when the programme ran into trouble and was abandoned. He went on to work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the US army and navy, nurturing his dreams of a perfect robot.

Five years ago Peter Yanofsky, founder of WowWee, the Canadian company that is one of the biggest toy manufacturers in North America, spotted Tilden on the Discovery Channel. He was demonstrating the “nervous network” which he had first developed for Nasa.

Yanofsky persuaded Tilden to move to Hong Kong and incorporate his ideas into a toy with artificial intelligence. Two years of work culminated in a three-week building session in which he used bits of wire and plastic that he scavenged from a hardware store. He pronounced the result quite stylish. “Every other robot looked like Pinocchio on life support,” he boasted.

Tilden embellished the model with sounds of his own creation. “All those burps and farts and snores and gestures, even its dance steps, are based on my personality,” he told an interviewer. “A lot of Thai food and soda went into some of the more interesting sounds.”

The toy’s launch in May gave the marketing people enough time to build a formidable PR campaign in the run-up to Christmas. When Hamleys awarded it best toy status, the scramble began. At £80 it was a fraction of the £1,250 pricetag of Sony’s AIBO robot dog, launched three years ago. Its remote control panel might have 21 buttons, but a simple colour code made it easy to use.

And it was cool: the boy band The Noise Next Door adopted Robosapien in the video for their single Lock Up Ya Daughters.

A factory in Shenzhen, China, began producing models at the rate of 10,000 a week, but many British stores failed to anticipate the fad and have sold out. Most toy shops must forecast demand up to 10 months before Christmas. “One moment customers want one thing and the next they want something else,” said Ben Green, chairman of the Toy Retailers Association.

How true. In the 1950s children wanted Subbuteo, Sooty, Muffin the Mule and model cars. Demand shifted in the 1960s to Spirograph, Sindy, Barbie, Action Man and Stylophone. All change in the 1970s to Mastermind, chopper bikes, Tardis, Spacehoppers, skateboards and Clackers.

Star Wars figures and Care Bears marked out the 1980s, along with Rubik’s Cubes, Sylvanian Families, the Smurf House, Big Yellow Teapot and Trivial Pursuit. In the 1990s children’s tastes switched to Nintendo Game Boy computer games, Spice Girl dolls, Buzz Lightyear, Teletubbies and Beanie Babies.

Who would ever have guessed that today’s youngsters would fall for a robot that breaks wind from both ends?