原创 Robot dog from the 50s looks interesting

The How Things Work group on Yahoo is moving from one topic to another with the agility of a mountain goat.

Someone just gave a link to an article along with this message saying "This is an amazing piece of work that seems to have no history."

Since I love robots and the subject of the message was "Interesting robot dog from the 1950s" I just had to bounce over there and take a look (Click here to see the article).

It seems that Daniel C. Dennett – a professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts – spotted this unusual robot dog in a shop in France and he quickly snapped it up. (I don't blame him – if I'd seen something like this I would have bought it without thinking.)

This is just so amazingly cool. It's almost a retro version of Doctor Who's robot dog K-9 (I remember thinking K-9 was so cool when I was a kid ... but truth to tell I'm glad he's no longer with the Doctor apart from the occasional guest appearance).

But let's not wander off into the weeds... take a look at the picture below and see what you think:

So now the big question is "Who made this little beauty and why?" I would also like to know just what it's capable of, because it looks much too sophisticated for a radio controlled model. It appears to pre-date integrated circuits, so I'm assuming that it's transistor-based and uses analog environmental detection (proximity, touch, light, sound?) and control functions.

Ooooh! I would love to get my hands on this...