Shifting gears: accustomed to the entertaining world of theme parks, AVG Inc. is trying to adapt its robotics technology to the serious business of ho

THINGS are not as much fun as they used to be at AVG Inc.

After a quarter century making friendly robots for theme parks and museums, the company is pursuing a more hostile market.

Shaken by postponed orders from the fall-off in theme park attendance and sensing a chance to venture into the homeland security business, AVG is developing bomb-detecting robots and other anti-terrorist products.

"Since Sept. 11, it has been pretty bad," said Alvaro Villa, the company's president and founder. "But it brings new opportunities for us."

The warehouse behind the company's Chatsworth offices is filled with a stripped-down version of Disneyland. Naked robots--a mess of circuits and wires--lay scattered across the hangar-sized room. In the back of the warehouse is a motorcycle-sized dragon's head. Its body, no doubt the size of a school bus, is nowhere to be seen.

This is one of AVG's more menacing creations, though it doesn't appear to be the kind of thing that will thwart a terrorist plot.

Which is why, after years servicing the entertainment industry, moving into homeland security could be an uphill battle.

"There are a lot of good ideas out there, and a lot of good technology, but accessing the federal government requires different skills," said Victor Hwang, chief operating officer of Larta, a technology think tank in Los Angeles. "It's a little more than meeting people and tapping into networks."

Besides leveraging its core technologies to develop security products, the company has hired lobbyists and consultants in the pursuit of Washington money.

Muscle control

Meanwhile, its engineers are busy designing new products Villa said would be ready for sale in six months. The bomb-detecting robot, one of two homeland security products, is an attempt to leverage the proprietary actuators--the engineering that gives robot arms and phalanges the ability to grab and manipulate. While the actuators appear to be no more than a linear-moving rod attached to a cylindrical power source, they are more complicated--a system of gears and motors which took two years to develop.

Thus far, the application has been limited to such things as a troop of dancing frogs at an amusement park. But Villa has in mind other purposes, such as allowing an explosives expert to disarm a bomb from a safe distance.