The robot toy prototype detailed here is based on a figure original to Japan’s northeastern-most island of Hokkaido. Traditionally made of native ezomatsu (Picea jezoensis) wood it was the carving of a Blakiston’s fish owl, an Aynu household god called Kotan Kor Kamuy. The design concept incorporates traditional building blocks, or “tsumiki.” We detail the design process of the Blakiston’s fish owl toy and the drive mechanism. It includes an electronic circuit, a microprocessor, a servomotor, and a sensor. We also describe how we developed the effective prototype implementing these components.

1. [1] “National TaX Reports in 2005,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan, 2005.
2. [2] T. Midori, “Food-Processing and Regional Economy – Focus on Hokkaido,” Report of Financial Climate in Food Product Company in 2007, the Food Marketing Research and Information Center, 2007.
3. [3] “Project report of “mokuiku”,” the fisheries and forester branch of Hokkaido government, March 2005
4. [4] H. Fukuda and T. Ohuchi, “Behavior of Student by Using Wooden Dishes For School Lunch (1st report): Dereferences of Behavior According to Characteristics of Each Student,” J. of Wood Industry, Vol.48, No.2, pp. 65-69, 1993 (in Japanese).
5. [5] H. Fukuda and T. Ohuchi, “Behavior of Student by Using Wooden Dishes For School Lunch (2nd report): Analysis Of Student Behavior And Design Of Dishes,” J. of Wood Industry, Vol.49, No.5, pp. 219-222, 1994 (in Japanese).
6. [6] Y. Obata, K. Takeuchi, H. Imanishi, Y. Furuta, and K. Kanayama, “Engineering Evaluation of Tactile Warmth for Wood,” Int. J. of the Society of Materials Engineering for Resources, Vol.10, No.1, pp. 14-19, 2002.
7. [7] H. S. Raffle, A. J. Parkes, and H. Ishii, “Topobo: A Constructive Assembly System with Kinetic Memory”, Proc. 2004 Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004), April 2004.
8. [8] K. Maeda, “Engineering Plastic,” J. of Chemical Society of Japan, Vol.36, No.5, pp. 479-483, 1988 (in Japanese).