The University of Florida's Marston Makerspace held a Crappy Robots event where teams had to use motors and battery packs to get a robot across a five-foot plank without falling off. Participants built everything from an alligator robot to a caterpillar-style machine and robots with spinning arms.
One participant even argued that the rules never said the whole robot had to reach the end, then tried to catapult just a piece of it down the plank. The event rewarded improvisation, loopholes and gloriously imperfect machines.
Lower the success bar and rule-lawyering becomes the most advanced technology in the room. The catapult interpretation is wonderful.
Most automatic Rubik's Cube machines are built to solve the puzzle as efficiently as possible. This one was deliberately made to represent the experience of someone who cannot solve it. Created by Shintaro Tamefusa, who says he cannot solve a Rubik's Cube himself, the machine grabs the cube with four arms, performs apparent analysis on a PC and keeps turning the puzzle. Eventually it starts voicing doubts, suggests dubious shortcuts and finally gives up and drops the cube. Instead of automating competence, it automates being stuck.
The machine doesn't solve the puzzle; it mechanizes the feeling of not knowing what to do. Even the robot starts losing confidence.
Press a button and the Vomit Comic Robot generates a one-off random comic and spits it from its mouth on receipt paper. Created by Cadin Batrack, the machine combines a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer and a laser-cut plywood body. Processing software arranges hand-drawn elements into comic panels at random. There is no intended narrative relationship between the images, but the comic layout encourages people to invent one anyway. Even the physical output mechanism reinforces the joke: the robot appears to vomit nonsense comics on demand.
A thermal printer would have worked, but giving the output a robot body and calling it vomiting makes the interface impossible to ignore.
A handheld fan is usually supposed to be small and light. KOBAYASHI KAITO ELECTRO took the opposite route with a 'world's most powerful(?) handheld fan' driven by a Makita power-tool battery for Maker Faire Tokyo 2026. The device is assembled from five 3D-printed parts and accepts the chunky tool battery directly. It remains technically handheld, but its power system has clearly wandered into the world of workshop equipment.
The fan stayed handheld, but the power source suddenly became power-tool grade. Portability is now negotiating with ambition.
Bentobot was built so online friends could control real combat robots from phones and computers anywhere in the world. Thomas Nguyen created three small Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-powered machines with drive motors and separate weapon motors, including flippers and spinning weapons. Viewers could join live streams, receive access through an app and immediately fight physical robots in the arena. Nguyen even created a lightweight custom language to reduce control latency. Instead of simulating robot combat online, the network ends at actual machines hitting each other.
Most online games keep the damage virtual. Here, the internet connection ends in two real robots smashing into each other.
To give in-game death more physical consequence, maker Hori built a system where dying in Super Mario Bros. triggers a basin to fall from above the player's head. The setup listens for Mario's death music, then activates a servo that releases the basin. During testing, microphone noise caused a false detection and dropped the basin even though Mario was still alive. A machine designed to increase immersion accidentally introduced its own real-world version of an unfair game event.
Trying to make game death feel more real also means a false positive becomes physically real. That's an aggressively immersive bug.
HAHA (Hypertrophic Ambidextrous Hand and Arm) is a performance work that adds an extra robotic arm to the human body with hyperextension, ambidextrous motion and continuous rotation. Developed by Stelarc with Sorbonne University's ISIR, it turns the simple idea of “one more arm” into a full body-machine choreography.
The performer is physically connected to the system through a magnetic lock and controls the installation using an exoskeleton plus ECG and EMG sensors. The robot's motion also drives live video switching and sound generation.
The bonus arm isn't merely extra; it gets movement abilities the original human arms never had. The upgrade has overtaken the base model.
To help a homemade two-wheel bike steer and balance, the designers built a system where the stuffed cat riding on top physically shifts its weight from side to side. The Maker Space KM1 user group showed the project ahead of Maker Faire Tokyo 2026. The wheels steer, but the cat moves too, and the battery is deliberately carried on the cat's body to raise the center of gravity and make the weight shift more effective. The mascot is not decoration; it is part of the control strategy.
The cat isn't just a passenger; it has an actual engineering job as moving ballast. Cuteness now comes with control-system responsibilities.
To automate livestock hygiene, researchers built an autonomous robot that uses AI, geolocation and a hybrid power system to clean organic waste from barns.
The machine was developed at Peru's Universidad Continental by Diego Cajachagua Guerreros, Rodrigo Ortiz Zacarias and Olga Huari Huamán, and won a gold medal at KIWIE 2026 in South Korea. Its technology stack is sophisticated; its assignment is extremely practical: clean the barn.
AI, geolocation and hybrid power all converge on one mission: clean the barn properly. Advanced robotics is very good at getting real work assigned to it.
The 2026 Tokyo edition of Hebocon, a robot contest specifically for people with low technical skills, was held on August 29. Homemade robots battle on a small sumo-style ring, but using technology that is too sophisticated can earn a High-Tech Penalty. Sankei reported on the event on September 6, highlighting the awkward machines, unusual performances and enthusiastic crowd.
It's a robot contest where building the robot too well can cost you points. Maintaining low-tech purity may be a skill of its own.
At Brisbane Festival, a 130 cm humanoid named QUTie will lead visitors through wellness exercises. The Unitree G1-based robot is used by QUT's Centre for Robotics for human-robot interaction research.
It has been trained on the movement routine using motion capture, can walk, run, dance and roll, and is scheduled to guide public exercise sessions on September 22 and 23. The fitness instructor of the future may be the one participant whose movements are literally programmed.
When the wellness coach is a robot, the person saying “move your body naturally” is also the most programmed one there. Oddly persuasive.
Robot vacuums work well on flat floors, but stairs stop them completely. Saros Rover tackles that problem with wheel assemblies that extend like legs, letting the machine lift itself one step at a time. It was demonstrated at IFA 2026.
The robot carefully raises its body onto each tread and cleans as it goes, taking about three minutes in the demonstration. Rather than being carried upstairs by another device, the vacuum itself performs the climb.
Instead of giving the vacuum a ride upstairs, they gave the vacuum legs. That's a very demanding version of independence.
Lower the success bar and rule-lawyering becomes the most advanced technology in the room. The catapult interpretation is wonderful.