Ollie Robot That Pulls Gnarly Moves Is Not a Poser

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

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In skateboarding, an 'Ollie' is a no-hands aerial stunt that looks impossible, dangerous and righteously cool. In the world of robot toys, an Ollie is a can-shaped two-wheeler that, despite its obvious lack of hands and a skateboard, can pull off stunts reminiscent of skateboard legend Tony Hawk.

A follow-up to the well-known and fairly popular Sphero ball robot, Ollie (it was called the Sphero 2B at CES 2014) is a remote control robot toy that takes commands from your iPhone or Android device.

The robot toy launches on Sept. 15 with pre-orders for the $99 bot beginning the day before.

Effective as both a robot and a toy, Ollie is twice as large as the Sphero and because it has two wheels, it can perform eye-popping stunts. The ball-as-locomotion Sphero cannot.

Getting ready to be awesome

Like Sphero, Ollie is pretty self-contained. Putting it together only requires sliding on a pair of rubber wheels, which slip over Ollie's hard plastic ones, and then snapping into place two hubcaps. I did have a bit of trouble assembling the latter and finally realized I had to push a lot harder to snap the hubcaps into place. In keeping with the skateboard ethos, Sphero will offer optional wheels, for different terrains, and hubcaps styles later this year.

Ollie's mostly white, 4.5-inch-by-3.25-inch body includes a Sphero logo that looks like a face and a series of LED-lit bars that get shorter as they get closer to the Ollie's single micro USB charging port.

Don't go looking for a power button once you've charged Sphero up. The robot toy turns on in a pretty smart and quite intuitive way. You install the Ollie App on your iPhone or Android device and it will immediately instruct you to place the phone next to Ollie. As soon as you do so, Ollie and the phone will communicate over Bluetooth 4 LE and Ollie's face, bars and lights around the USB port will light up. The robot also automatically shuts down when you close the app.

Ollie App

The app, by the way, is quite a departure from the one for Sphero control. On launch, all you'll see is the word 'Ollie,' a large control pad or virtual joystick and two small icons for settings and reorienting Ollie. You place your thumb in the center circle and drag it about the larger circle to move Ollie around. If you turn your phone sideways, the app adds a trick pad. To use it, you place your thumb anywhere and drag it around. Ollie will do tricks such as spinning and hops. The app will reward you with exclamations such as 'sick spin,' and '180 double steam roll.'

It can be a little difficult to control Ollie. The robot moves fast (it can go up to 14 miles per hour) and with nothing more than a circle to control it, it's often a struggle to get Ollie to go where you want it to. I can't tell you how many times I ended up against a wall and, while simply sliding my thumb backward should have moved it away from the wall, it flipped around and headed back to the wall again.

What I'd really like to see is the ability to control Ollie using the iPhones' gyroscope, so if I tilted the phone this way and that, Ollie would follow. This is one of the control options offered by Parrot's AR.Drone and once you get the hang of it, it can be pretty intuitive.

I'm not saying I didn't eventually get the hang of Ollie. I did, though I noticed that when I stopped using it, I kind of forgot the nuances of controlling this hyperactive robot. When I got it going right though, I could zip along at top speed and, because it was moving so fast, make Ollie perform some spectacular tumbles and hairpin turns. Sphero provided me with a small TechDeck ramp and I even managed to jump it a few times. The company hopes to eventually offer Bluetooth-enabled smart ramps that can communicate with Ollies as they ride the ramps and keep track of which Ollies did the best stunts.

There are a lot of hidden Ollie controls in the app. If, for instance, Ollie gets disoriented, the app lets you use an 'aiming' option to set it right. This adds a triangle on the control circle to show you Ollie's front. You place your thumb on that and slowly move it until Ollie's front is facing away from you. This definitely makes it easier to steer the little bot.

Under the 'pause' button, you'll find all of Ollie's customizable settings. You can name the robot, choose what kind of surface it's driving on (hard or soft), the size of the driving area (room or open) and even use a trio of sliders to set speed, handling and acceleration. So for open areas, you might maximize all three of the settings.

I drove Ollie a lot and was pleased to see it can speed and spin for roughly an hour on a single charge. And Ollie is tough. I ran it into furniture, popped a wheelie off a ramp, and accidentally sent it flying off a table, yet Ollie just kept on going

Do More

Sphero will eventually release four free apps for Ollie. Along with the main driving app, there'll be one where you can draw a path on the app and Ollie will follow. After that, the company is set to release two programming apps.

The company has been encouraging developers and students to hack and code for its robots since it held its first hackathon in 2012. So many non-programmers showed up for the event that Sphero realized it needed to offer easier access to their robot's programming layer. Now all of Sphero's programming apps, including the new ones coming for Ollie, make accessing all of the robots' functions easy.

They've even positioned it as a learning tool. Last April, the company launched SPRK, which included a sort of lesson plan for programming robots. The first task was programming the robot to move in a perfect square. So far 350 schools have signed up for the program.

More than a bot

Overall, I like Ollie. It's fast, fun, and a bit unpredictable. I do worry that users could grow frustrated as they try to figure out the nuances of joystick-only control. Though I came to believe that, with enough time spent, Ollie is probably a robot I could learn to expertly control.

Of course, Ollie is more than just a gnarly, trick-happy, skateboarder-aping robot. It's a teaching tool that could help you and your kids learn about robots and programming while you think you're having fun. It's for that reason that I recommend it.

Sphero Ollie

Hard to control

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