In his five-year tenure as host of The Late Late Show on CBS, Craig Ferguson has never had a band or a sidekick. In fact, it's become sort of a running joke that he's had to do without such costly flourishes. But all that will change when MythBuster Grant Imahara comes to The Late Late Show to deliver Geoff Petersen—a robot sidekick built especially for the late-night host. "Craig's a really big fan of MythBusters and he knows I build robots," Imahara told Popular Mechanics on March 29 during a break from building the bot. "When he started on Twitter he called his followers the Robot Skeleton Army. Then he put two and two together and said, 'robot skeleton army, robot sidekick, Grant Imahara from MythBusters, this is the perfect combination.' And that's how it started."

Ferguson's vision was a rough-and-ready robot skeleton that could move and speak at the push of a button. "I said, 'well, it would be easier to make this radio-controlled—your sound man plays back the clip off-stage and it comes through the studio speakers and then some guy off-camera moves the robot around, basically puppeteering it," Imahara says. But when he found a control board that would play back MP3 files, the original vision was back in play. "It moved out of the do-it-yourself, fairly simple realm and into something much more complicated," he says. "But in the end it'll be a lot more cool."

Imahara started by replacing the torso of a plastic skeleton with a metal plate that holds two servomotors, two batteries and the control boards. The plan called for the robot's right arm to lift and point, something a skeleton arm made of plastic just couldn't do. "Not unlike Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, Geoff's got a bionic arm," Imahara says. "The plastic has been split in half and there's an aluminum piece in the middle." The metal arm, which has 90 degrees of movement, connects to a shoulder mechanism that is controlled by one of the servomotors.

Geoff's head also needed to turn both to the left and the right, so Imahara built a mechanism similar to the one at the robot's shoulder, with 180 degrees of travel. He connected it to the second, faster servomotor. Dual servos control the movement of Geoff's jaw. Imahara gave the robot skeleton two white LED indicators for eyes, which light up when the head moves. Two batteries (one 5 volts, one 12) provide power to the entire system.

The skeleton's movements are preprogrammed into an onboard microcontroller. When Ferguson presses a button on the control box (Imahara built that too), it signals the micro-controller, which executes a set of code that corresponds to the movements. "All the servomotors are plugged into the micro-controller," Imahara says. "He presses the button and they start moving."

Geoff's controller also plays back MP3 files that are stored on a micro SD card. Ferguson has recorded seven phrases in his own Scottish brogue, which has been processed to sound like a robot. "You press a button and it says, 'You're the man, Craig,'" Imahara explains. "And as the sound comes out of his onboard speaker, his head will turn, his jaw will move and his arm will go up and down, or some combination of that. It should be very simple from [Craig's] end, but there'll be a lot going on in the background in terms of making things move to a specific sound that comes out of the robot." Imahara has also built in a manual mode, which would allow Ferguson to go off-script by having someone offstage puppeteer the robot via a radio-control unit.

Imahara has been building the robot around production of MythBusters and admits he hasn't been getting much sleep. When he spoke with Popular Mechanics one week before the robot's grand unveiling, he still needed to write the software that would make Geoff move, and build Ferguson's control box. But he says all the lost sleep will be worth it to see Ferguson's reaction to his new sidekick. "He was so excited about this and so looking forward to it that it made me want to step it up in terms of what I could deliver," Imahara says. "So I think he's gonna be really, really happy with how it turned out."

Thinking about building your own robot sidekick? You can get all the necessary parts off the Internet. "Given enough time and money," Imahara says, "you could build your own army of sidekicks that will each say up to seven phrases." And although Imahara says people on Twitter have branded him as "the originator of Skynet," he'd prefer to take on another role in the eventual and unavoidable robot uprising. "I think that really there's no better-equipped person to lead the Resistance," he says. "That's what I keep telling Geoff, anyway. 'I put you together, I'll take you apart.'"

Craig's Robot Skeleton Sidekick!

Arm Connects Here

Raising Up and Pointing Out

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