There is a long-standing tradition in Africa of using wire scraps to create toy cars, artistic sculpture and other forms. Upcycling wire waste is much better environmentally than melting it down for recycling, and as a cultural practice it is much beloved repository of skill, tradition and ingenuity. Afrobotics merges contemporary computing, sensors, effectors and other electronics with this wire sculpture tradition.
As a worker-owned cooperative, the Afrobotics® network supplies start-up funding so that African entrepreneurs can invent, produce and market their own devices. We take no fees. A new part of the program teams up makers in Detroit, so that the African partners can get paid for their designs without having to ship anything overseas (thus preventing a large carbon footprint and loss of funding to pay for shipping). The Detroit makers (who are African American) can modify the design, and similarly are free to produce, market and pocket the profits. This leaves makers on both sides of the Atlantic free to focus on their creative entrepreneurship, while encouraging knowledge sharing and reconnecting communities with a shared heritage.
The Uganda group is already shipping their “YiiyaBot” using model vehicles, and bottle cap wheels:
The Namibia group decided to create a design based on the praying mantis, a kind of “trickster” figure in traditional stories. They included ideas for using ultrasonic sensors for eyes.
This is an early model of the MantisBot, using an analog motor to keep costs as low as possible. More advanced versions use servo motors and have remote control options. In the US you can purchase the low cost version from our Detroit partners: https://www.mbad.org/africanfuturist