A Marty kit comes with everything you need to build a walking robot, including a screwdriver. You'll get:

• All the plastic parts to build a Marty - 54 parts
• Servo motors. To make Marty move. You'll get four metal geared ones for the main drive motors, and five more standard motors for the leg twist, arm and eyebrow movements.
• Screws. For screwing. And some spares in case you drop some.
• Control board. To plug everything into and actually make Marty do stuff.
• WiFi. Yep, that's on the control board.
• Starter sensors. A couple of buttons/bump switches, an accelerometer for measuring tilt (and acceleration), current sensing to see how much work the motors are doing
• Rechargeable lithium ion battery, and battery charger
• Software. For remote control, and for programming in languages including Scratch, Python and C++.
• Instructions, although we have a lot of web based content!
• A screwdriver, the only tool you'll need to build a Marty

A new way to move

Marty has a unique leg design, which makes him easier to use than a traditional walking robot and prolongs battery life. Marty can walk, turn, dance, kick a ball, and - of course - bust out some funky dance moves!

Marty's legs are a bit different to a traditional walking robot. Each leg has three motors: one for forwards and backwards, one for side to side, and one for turning .

That's fewer motors than a traditional two legged walking robot, and makes Marty cheaper to make, easier to use, and use less energy to move around. The new design allows all kinds of movements, and gives Marty a bit of swagger!

A spring in the step. We use springs to help support Marty’s weight and reduce the amount of work the motors have to do. Marty can even stand on one leg even with all motors turned off!

Getting started programming Marty is incredibly easy.

To beginners we recommend starting in Scratch, a “graphical” language where programming is as simple as clicking and moving blocks. Scratch is aimed at ages from 9+ and widely used around the world.

You can make Marty interact with the environment by moving blocks around to read information from his sensors and sending commands back to his motors.

When you are ready to go into learning text-based programming, Marty makes the transition as easy as possible by providing the same kind of functions in Python too - except they're more powerful.

No previous knowledge of programming is required to program Marty, but if you know what you're doing you can jump in straight away using Python, C++, Javascript, C#, and many more programming languages!

Your kit comes with everything you need to build a Marty, but if you have a 3D printer you can customise the parts! The plastic parts can be 3D printed, and the CAD files will be available.

So if you do have access to a 3D printer you can customise the designs as much as you like. The electronics on board also support additional sensors and motors.

For instance, you could make a four-legged Marty, a wheeled Marty, a bigger Marty, make arms with closable grippers - or anything else you can think of!

Marty is built to hold a full size Raspberry Pi (a little credit card sized computer), so while it's not required to have one, you can add one and then you have a walking quad-core computer!

With a Raspberry Pi on the robot you can do things like vision processing all on-board for tracking a ball and playing football, or even detecting faces to make Marty communicate with your friends!

Adding a Raspberry Pi is very straightforward, as we provide you with a special cable for power and data connection, and a downloadable Raspbian image pre-configured to work with Marty!

Marty's control electronics are custom made and designed to address a few of the issues we have with other control boards on the market. Based around a 180 MHz ARM Cortex M4 micro-controller, the board takes care of all Marty's low level functions, generating movements in real time, reading sensors, and connecting to WiFi.

As well as controlling Marty's servos, our control board also measures the electrical current being used by each servo. That means we can tell if a motor is being over-stressed and turn it off before it risks damaging itself.

The control boards also include:

• An accelerometer for measuring tilt and acceleration.
• A beeper for making noise.
• WiFi module
• Lots of ports for connecting additional sensors, motors, and circuit boards.
• The control board is also designed to support a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi - providing a power and data link.
• A battery charger

Marty is designed to be more than a pretty face. Multiple degree of freedom limbs make a robot that is interesting to control. With the capability to use sensors like motor current, accelerometers, force sensors, and even camera(s), you can get into some quite advanced topics in robotics. For example - movement generation, mapping, localisation, and high-level planning.

Right now you can program Marty in Scratch, Python, Javascript and C++, and there are APIs to simplify issuing commands and reading from sensors. We'll support more languages with time, with precedence given first to popular ones such as Java, C# and a few others more.

With a Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer) on board you can do your vision processing for a completely autonomous robot. With a Pi you can even run ROS, the Robot Operating System, on the robot - and we provide wrappers to make it easier to interface with the entirety of the robot software.