Here’s a video I’ve wanted to post for a long time. It was a project for a college class in 1994, taught by one of MIT’s most understanding professors, Donald Troxel. Carlton Mills digitized the old VHS copy of our video report.

It was built by a team of three students: John Wallberg, Adam Holt, and me—we were the leftovers, actually, who hadn’t already found lab partners. Our two project ideas were this and robotic air hockey, and we were pretty sure a sheepdog would be both easier and safer. But we still finished it about 10 days late, working right up until we all had to leave for winter break. But it still won a prize (follow the link and search for “Newton”)!

The sheepdog itself is a LEGO robot covered by a cardboard box, and the sheep is a jittery baby toy. The sheepdog controls are three hand-built computers running 5-volt TTL logic, 8-bit 10MHz microcontrollers, miscellaneous op-amps and potentiometers, and at best 256 bytes of RAM and a few kilobytes of EEPROM. It turns out you can do some basic vision, navigation, and motor control with that!

Some details: