A Scottish Doctor Who fan/computing science student named Gary Taylor has brought an old husk of a K9 back to life. Last September, he stumbled onto the K9 shell at a lab within Abertay University in Dundee, and saw an opportunity for a project.

“I love robotics, I love programming, I love dogs and I love Doctor Who”, Taylor explained. “[This project is] a good mix of everything – it kept me really invested in the whole thing throughout the whole project.

“He had a lot of water damage from a roof leak so all the electrics in him had just fried. He was just a shell.” And so began a project that saw Taylor deploying 15,000 lines of computing code, as well as fitting a gyroscope, ultrasound sensors, boards, motors, shields and drives.

It was no small undertaking, but Taylor rebuilt K9’s innards regardless, upgrading the Doctor’s iconic sidekick into an “autonomous obstacle-avoiding mapping robot” controlled via smartphone. Now there’s a toy that a lot of Who fans would pay good money for.

“It all started just as an honours idea”, Taylor stated. “It was pitched to me by a bunch of supervisors. As soon as I heard the idea, I was so keen to get on to it. I emailed the supervisor that day, saying, ‘I have got to do this’.

“It was a lot of work. If it wasn’t for the university lecturers helping me and guiding me along the way, I’d be nowhere near finished.”

The upgraded K9 was unveiled at the Abertay Digital Graduate Show earlier this month. And might we just say well done to Mr Taylor for seeing a truly awesome project through to fruition.

Gallifreyan Newsroom / Photo credit: CascadeNews