Where can I find good examples of analog insect-like robots?

Could that be Mark Tilden? BEAM robotics?

If so, a Canadian website used to promote / sell BEAM components and products. Solarbotics. Top entry on the left-hand menu (BEAM).

As this question was resurrected by a misguided answer, let me take the opportunity to elaborate.

I actually bumped into Mark Tilden for a few years in a row as a regular contributor to the Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop, from the time when he was still in Los Alamos until after he joined the WoWee Toys team.

Mark’s ideas are at the most informal edge of what’s considered Neuromorphic Engineering. His extremely simple robotic circuit creations (which he named BiCore Nervous Networks) are examples of the types of emergent behaviors that can be elicited when mechanics model themselves and interact with non-linear feedback system elements. At the time these ideas had already made it into orbit and the news, with his extremely simple circuits being used to keep a satellite aligned to the Earth magnetic field, with a minimalist power expenditure. Do note that this was in the mid 1990’s.

Although the guy is definitely a pioneer, his ideas lacked much of the academic rigor that is expected in science, and were always deemed more of a curiosity within a field that is thought of as a curiosity itself. These ideas seem to lack the theoretical foundation that would make it possible to build on top of (do note, that this is the same way as Neural Networks were perceived in the 1970’s).

At WowWee he scaled up his insect creations which they called B.I.O. Bugs (we had dozens of these roaming around at the workshop), and the toy company (already a Hasbro subsidiary) became well known when it introduced first the Robosapien line and later a line of simple flying robots with the DragonFly.

Unfortunately, precisely because of the lack of theoretical foundation, these analog “insect brain” ideas were hard to work with, scale, and reliably integrate within a mass-market cost-driven application. It is my understanding that these initial toys actually used micro controllers programmed to emulate the analog behavior.