Gail and Julia driving the fembot around the yard

After a lot of nailbiting on our part, our volunteer team of engineers shipped out the new robotic female grouse, and it arrived on Saturday. Right now it isn’t much to look at- other than the fiberglass resin shell in the shape of a taxidermy form, it is just a mobile assembly of circuit boards and wires right now. Gail has already done quite a bit to fix it up. She’s re-routed the power for the servos controlling body posture to get rid of some interference, and tucked much of the electronic guts inside the shell. We’ve also given the fembot a few test drives. We initially thought that the treads would be superior to the wheels in terms of maneuverability, but it turns out the added clearance from the wheels may be more important.

Fembot version 2.0- off-road edition