The R. Dorothy Project
Making Dorothy a Body

I contend that a truly effective Artificial Intelligence must have a body. Without means to interact with the world, an A.I. cannot learn.


When you start considering building an android, you can't just go to the android junkyard and pick up some spare parts.


There are sources for kits and models, but no one of these is sufficient, in itself, to build what I want to build.


I have to fabricate the body from scratch, so I started the design of a body mold.

The body mold will be used, through several steps, to create several vacuform molds. Plastic sheets will be formed over the final molds and then will be cinched together to form skin, enclosing the workings of the android. Dorothy's First-Generation body will be like plate armor... or a Stormtrooper uniform... but with a much more pleasing shape.


I began by creating a computer model inside AutoCAD.
This model consisted of 'slices' of a body, much like
the seperate images in a CAT scan.

I based my model on the physical parameters of the
R. Dorothy Anime character, to the best of my ability
to calculate her dimensions as they would be if she were
a real android.

There were several false starts and I had to refer to a
number of sources, artistic and medical, to get proportions
that were consistent.

I took as a basic premise that R. Dorothy is 5' - 3" tall.    I
placed grids over a number of drawings from the Big O series,
from fan art, and the original Manga. Of course, Dorothy is much
too slender to be a healthy human being, but I am counting on that
unique body configuration to both place emphasis on her non-human
aspect, and remove some of the 'threat' that people might perceive
in an android built like a Terminator.

I 'fleshed out' the computer model with polygon facets and checked
the result from many angles to see if it "looked right". The rotating
image below is small in order to hold several frames of animation without
becoming megabytes in size.

Next, I printed out to-scale drawings of the slices and cut them from 1/4"
plywood. The slices were at one-inch increments, so seperating them with
3/4" square dowels recreated the original physical form.
Some of the curature of the natural body form is so severe over a short
radius, that I cut additional slices to go at 1/2" increments and spaced
them out with plywood spacers. Assembling the model, this is what I ended up with.


Next, realizing that the shape of the chest would be critical to define
the android as having a feminine appearance, I added cross-pieces to more
clearly define the curvature.

Finally, I have [as of September 24, 2009] added the 'arm sockets' to
the body frame and I have begun adding a skin composed of strips of
plastic tape that will not adhere to my molding compound.
The image below is the torso skin-molding template NOW:

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