Solarbotics is based in Canada, so the Photopopper had to go through some form of Customs inspection. A Photopopper looks somewhat like an oversized Palmetto bug commonly found in trailer parks in south Florida. A Photopopper is a BEAM robot. BEAM stands for B iology E lectronics A esthetics M echanics . Mark Tilden, a chubby Canadian physicist working at Los Alamos is the inventor of Beam robots and the philosophy behind them.
BEAM robots make no pretense to being intelligent.
They are simply survival machines, similar to any low-level organism. A Photopopper's goal is to find the best source of light and travel towards it. Tilden holds the patents on the circuits, but makes them freely available for private use. This keeps BEAM robot development mainly in the realm of the garage hacker, which is good. BEAM robots and their disciples parallel experimenters and pioneers in the early days of personal computing.