King Bob Leads This Minion Army

What would you do if you saw an army of Minions heading your way? Run away screaming, perhaps? Maybe roll your eyes and cringe? Well, you may find out the answer if you happen to live in same town as Thomas Locatelli of the Electo YouTube channel. He used the power of engineering to raise an army of Minions led by one particularly smart yellow fellow named King Bob.

Locatelli started this project with a pretty simple goal: to create a contingent of canary-colored cretins. He wanted them to be capable of moving as a group, so he could direct them as one unit and force them to do his bidding — that bidding being to amuse people in public areas. A single Minion is nothing, so Locatelli needed several of them. Each is a robot that can drive around on wheels attached to the legs. But Locatelli couldn’t afford to make all of them sophisticated machines with complex hardware and that led him to the coronation of King Bob.

King Bob is the leader of this Minion troop and is smarter than the rest. Like his lesser brethren, he is a 3D-printed and painted shell filled with electronic components, including an Arduino Nano dev board, a radio transceiver module, two drive motors, and a battery. But unlike the others, King Bob also has hardware that lets him respond to visual stimuli in addition to commands sent by a handheld radio transmitter controller. A single-board computer and camera let King Bob run computer vision software, so he can perform tasks like object recognition. That lets him do fun stuff, such as follow a banana held by Locatelli.

Locatelli experimented with a whole bunch of different techniques for making the Minion army follow King Bob, including GPS tracking and equipping every robot with computer vision hardware of its own. But he ultimately settled on a much simpler method: mimicry.

Whether following explicit commands or bananas, King Bob’s Arduino board ends up with specific motor commands, like “go forward by X amount” or “turn left 90 degrees.” And every Minion also has a radio transceiver. So, Locatelli programmed King Bob to relay all motor commands to the other Minions. They will, therefore, mimic any movement King Bob makes and they can all move as a group.

That theory is sound, but the real world never cooperates. Because they’re spread out, a Minion might run into an obstacle that isn’t in King Bob’s path. Or small movement inaccuracies can add up. The result is a bumbling jumble of yellow idiots that become increasingly clumsy over time. Fortunately, that fits the Minion theme and so Locatelli was able to declare the project a success.