Marvin (Mobile Anthropomorphic Robot VINtage high tech robot) by David Gossman (1983), Iowa Precision Machine Ltd, Milford, Iowa. With its retro, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" styling, Marvin is a 4’2” tall anthropomorphic personal robot. It has 15 degrees-of-freedom in total, including a pair of six-axis arms, a mobile base, and it can also turn its head. Controlled by an on-board Motorola 68000 processor with a standard disk drive, it navigates using ultrasonic ranging. It also has a speech synthesizer with a 500-word vocabulary. “"Marvin was originally designed and developed to be an educational tool, a training aid, primarily at post-secondary institutions, to facilitate the training of individuals in programming robots for industry and for students on the engineering side of the card," he said, Marvin's insides are much like the insides of industrial robots, but he sells for around $6,000 instead of $30,000 to $150,000 as industrial robots do, explained Gossman. That makes robotics courses affordable for post-secondary schools, he said, Marvin contains a computer eight times more powerful than a common personal computer, He can be programmed with the help of a computer terminal that plugs into his back and a computer language the firm developed just for him. Marvin has a large vocabulary, although Gossman admits his speech is sometimes hard to understand the first time it's heard. More understandable speech synthesizers could have been used but they had a limited vocabulary, he explained, Marvin's two arms have six movable joints and can lift objects weighing up to five pounds. He has wheels instead of feet and a sonar system that lets him find his way around objects by bouncing sound off them, Gossman came up with the idea of manufacturing Marvin about two years ago when he saw that schools could use a sophisticated, yet cheap, tool to teach robotics. Gossman said he decided to make Marvin have a human shape only because it "tends to attract attention" and not because there is any real need for him to look human-like, … "I really don't know whether robotics is the wave of the future, Wave of the future may be a bit strong," said Gossman” – by Judy Daubenmler, The Daily Reporter – Sep 20, 1984