Inventor chases dream with dancing robot

With inspiration from his son and his father, with programming skills and mail order motors, Hanno Sander is pursuing his dream.

He's building a dancing robot, an upright one that can waltz or tango or disco on two wheels. One that little girls can plug into their MP3 players and choreograph.

"They are challenging to build as a hobbyist because you need knowledge of soldering, mechanics, programming and physics." It happens that Sander is adept at all of these.

Sander was born in Germany and moved with his family to California's Silicon Valley as a 10-year-old. His father is a physicist, inventor and computer programmer.

Following his father's footsteps, Sander built satellites and hybrid cars while studying computer science at Stanford.

He graduated in 1995, just as the internet craze began. Excited by cyber-communication, Sander founded a company called Daptyx and wrote software programs allowing newspapers to monitor and customise which stories individual readers downloaded.

If they read more sports stories than business stories, their next download would contain more baseball statistics than Wall Street stock prices.

"It was a fascinating time," Sander says. "I very quickly learned about business, marketing and sales."

But Daptyx's 11 employees could not compete with companies like IBM. Sander sold it to Oracle and subsequently worked for Oracle as liaison between customers and software engineers.

A much-needed work break came in 2002 when he and his new wife took a one-year honeymoon to travel the world.

 The couple fell in love with New Zealand and immigrated to Christchurch a few years later.

"We wanted to raise our kids with a Kiwi lifestyle," he says.

Sander's idea of a Kiwi lifestyle included spending as much time as possible with his family and on his hobbies.

"I didn't want to jump into a nine-to-five job," he says. "I had programming skills and marketing skills. I knew something would happen job-wise."

His first job was to design and build a lower level to his Mt Pleasant house. When that task was finished, he thought about robots.

"They are on TV and in movies," he says. "We read about them in books. Kids love them.

"But at the moment, robots are either million-dollar industrial machines or simple toys. There are no affordable advanced robots."

Sander's interest in designing one became his Kiwi lifestyle job.

He wanted to create a two-wheeled upright robot that could flip light switches or open doors. He wanted it to turn on a dime, move across any surface and perhaps climb stairs.

But how to balance a robot on two wheels, where the centre of gravity is one metre off the ground?

Having a toddler in the house gave him clues. Humans,  particularly those learning to walk, learn to balance by swaying.

They continually move back and forth to find solid footing.

"It reminded me of Fred Astaire dancing."

And that's when Sander envisioned a dancing robot. "I could put a ball gown on it, make it cute and plushy."

The idea fit, he says, with the popularity of TV shows such as Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance.

He called it DanceBot to give kids a sense of having their own dance partner.

They would assemble the robot and watch pre-programmed demo dances. Then they could choreograph moves to their own MP3 music files and swap them over the internet.

The trick to building a dancing robot, Sander says, was to figure out how the robot knew if it was balanced or leaning too far in one direction.

Sander incorporated five motion sensors and a gyroscope into its circuit board, but there was no way of understanding the robot's sense of direction.

"I had to teach it which way was up and where to move to not fall down," he says.

There were no commercially available software programs to know what robots think, so Sander ended up writing his own.

Once that was done, it took him less than a month to get the robot to balance. The hard part was getting the robot to move smoothly, turning, swaying, and making circles.

"That took much longer."

Sander's first product to hit the market was ViewPort, the program he wrote to see inside robots' brains.

He's got a bit more tinkering to do with DanceBot before he's ready to submit blueprints to a manufacturing company.

Being a stay-at-home dad with two young children, his wife, their dog and ViewPort to look after on top of serving as Heathcote Valley Play Centre's president, he's happy to stay out of factory details and sales.

He sees his role as developing new robots from his foosball room, which also serves as a home office.

And he's got ideas for the next product line. Sander developed a sensor for his DanceBot to react to human movement.

You step back, DanceBot steps forward. You step left, it moves right.

"Ninety per cent of the time these movements are predictable and easy," he says. "Ten per cent something unexpected happens, and that's what takes up all the time."

Sander has not left boys out of the marketing picture. They like to crash cars, Sander says.

But there is only one way to win that game, and that's smashing them to smithereens.

Sander wants to put jousting arms on DanceBots and let kids control them.

A well-aimed jab would topple an opponent, scoring a clear victory without any damages.

But the holy grail of the robot world is for adults, Sander says, one that embraces the Kiwi lifestyle by opening a fridge door and distinguishing a beer bottle from the tomato sauce.

"I need to wow ordinary people."

- © Fairfax NZ News