Fight A Robot From Halfway Round The World

While fantasies of kicking Terminator’s butt may never come true, with MakeAffinity’s new revolutionary live robot sharing platform, you can not only play with your own robot, but also get the chance to control another halfway across the world. Or if you are up for some competition, pit your robot against an opponent in short death matches of 1 to 5 minutes. If you’ve been one of those boys or girls who loved playing with the Lego Mindstorms sets, this is your chance to take it one step further.

How It Works

A live robot sharing site, MakeAffinity promises to revolutionize the robotics hobbyist’s life and the industry. Anyone can go onto the site and book a slot for a particular robot to control it. (We can’t have multiple people controlling a robot at the same time, can we?) This means that if someone in Phoenix, Arizona (USA) someone has allowed access to his/her robot, you can actually book a slot to control it, from halfway around the world!

Or, if you have your own robot, you can share it with everyone else.

Try It Out Yourself

Solve the Rubik’s Cube and get USD 50 (apparently for real):

Shoot actual foam rockets at the MakeAffinity team in their office (for real!):

Why It Is Unique

This is probably the first time live robot sharing has ever been done around the world. This opens up much opportunities for global robot hobbyists around the world to connect, share robots, ideas and perhaps help one another improve on robot design and making processes.

Business Model

MakeAffinity empowers robot owners in more ways than one. Apart from allowing enthusiastic robot hobbyists from sharing their hard work with fellow hobbyists, the platform also allows them to earn some pocket money on the side as they can charge other users for booking slots to control their robots.

Of course, MakeAffinity gets a cut of the earnings to cover administrative costs.

But this is not where the main potential of MakeAffinity lies. If MakeAffinity garners enough of a following in the casual robotics crowd, the niche community that can be built up there would be very attractive to players in the industry.

Will This Take Off?

When I first heard about this idea from MakeAffinity’s founder, Thomas Tan, I must admit I was skeptical of whether such a platform will take off. I cited my concerns about safety of the robots and basically whether robot enthusiasts will be able to trust another fellow enthusiast enough to cede control of the robot, albeit for a few minutes. To put it simply, another could very easily destroy the robot that you took 6 months to build in just 6 minutes.

So tell me robot hobbyists, will you be willing to place your robot in hands of others?

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