Simone Giertz is not your average roboticist. The 25-year-old inventor and comedian is, she explains, "probably the world's only professional shitty robot builder."
Giertz's GIF-friendly creations, such as a robot arm that attempts (and fails) to serve breakfast, or scrawls lipstick all over her face, have accumulated more than eight million YouTube views and led to a growing viral fanbase.
A shitty robot, says Stockholm-based Giertz, "is one that solves a problem that doesn't exist, or solves a problem that does exist, but in a bad way". Her creations are built for laughs - witness a helmet that brushes your teeth and an alarm clock that violently slaps you awake with a rubber arm. (The latter has been viewed more than a million times, and nearly ripped out the Swede's hair.) Her Popcorn Feeding Helmet, pictured here, was created with MythBusters' Adam Savage.
After quitting a physics degree and flitting between a number of roles at startups and in tech journalism, Giertz settled on YouTube. Each creation requires spending weeks at a time painstakingly repurposing household objects for comic effect.
But being robo-slapped isn't just for laughs: on the contrary, Giertz says, her aim is to inspire more would-be inventors. "People think it's about the robot uprising, or a commentary on people being so lazy that they can't even make themselves breakfast," Giertz muses. "Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things. I really want to spur [on] that democratisation of technology."
As to why her blend of comedy and maker culture has taken off so wildly, there's a simpler explanation. "The internet is weird," she chuckles.
Wake-up Machine: An alarm clock attached to a rubber hand powered by a 165rpm brushless DC motor, this gives its human owner a rousing slap in the face.
Applause Machine: A pair of tongs with rubber hands attached, this claps - badly. Best used sarcastically, eg when another bad robot breaks.
Chopping Machine: Two kitchen knives lifted by a servo mechanism and springs, and controlled by an Arduino nano. Warning: best not used at home.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
