My inspiration for this project came from my brother-in-law Michael DeMaddis. He kept referring to a robot he built many years ago from a book called "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot" by David L. Heiserman. The theme was that the robot was able to survive on its own and learn as it traveled around in its own little world.

After repeatedly hearing about this wonderful little creature my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to see if I could find the book and see what this robot was all about. Even though this book had been out of print for a while a quick Google search on the Internet located a copy. The price was a very reasonable $10 so without any further haste I agreed to purchase it.

The original book was written in 1979 and the robot "Rodney" was made from technology and components that were available at the time. Twenty four years have passed and computers, electronics and technology have advanced to such a state that the poor little robot depicted by Mr Heiserman was to say the least, very antiquated. What did impress me though were the algorithms he used to bring Rodney to life.

It was at this point I decided to try and create a version of the Rodney robot using the parts and technology available to me in 2003. It was of utmost importance however to stay as close to the original programming algorithms that were used in the 1979 robot as possible.

And so this project was born.