Hip Monsters Presents Robot Freedom
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
September 25th-27th
The focus of this year’s exhibit is safety, security and how to get started on your own projects. It will have two main exhibits and one side show. The main exhibits introduce core concepts of artificial intelligence and robotics suitable for kids and professionals alike, centered around fully autonomous robots.
Main Exhibits
Talk To A Robot
This exhibit is a steampunk inspired robot that visitors can chat with via a keyboard. Visitors can also change between different types of artificial intelligence (heuristic, traditional chabot, LLM) and alignment (good or evil) to see the impact on the AI’s behavior.
Concepts:
- Learn about the different types of AI
- Learn about AI safety
- How AI can be controlled to be good or evil
- What behavior is inappropriate for a chatbot.
Interactions:
- Cycle through different types of AI.
- Change alignment (Good/Evil)
- Chat with the AI
Robots Making Decisions
The second exhibit is a larger robot central to online videos on RobotFreedom.com. This exhibit lets visitors see how a robot makes decisions and how to build a robot that interacts with the world around it.
Concepts:
- Agentic AI Decisioning
- Sensors
- AI Security
- Peripheral Devices
- Making with resin and silicon molding
- Moving from cardboard to “production”
Interactions:
- Sensors
- RFID Key Cards (the first 100 visitors will get their own card to disable our robots!)
- BLE Wearables
hipmonsters
HipMonsters started as a family project during Covid, where we created a website to show our creations. We then expanded to other social media platforms and did a small presentation at our school, which led to our first presentation at the Maker Faire 2024. Since then we have done after school workshops, Maker Fests and festivals throughout the Bay Area. We also collaborate with other artists, cosplay groups, and maker communities to get kids of all ages interested in STEAM and making.
