Best of Brooklyn: Peter Kokis’ Brooklyn Robotworks

They say one person's trash is another person's treasure, but Peter Kokis from Sheepshead Bay is taking that to a whole new level.
Kokis is known for turning heads at the Annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade in his handmade robot suit.
The suit is made out of ordinary household items including a toilet flush valve and soup cans.

The former military pilot not only turns himself into his robots, but he's turned his art into a business called Brooklyn Robotworks. 

"There's no one in the world who does what I do the way I do it,” says Kokis. “I design them and build them like an aircraft with redundancy."  

Kokis tells News 12 he works on his robots on nights and weekends. One piece alone from “The Terminator” took him about 30 hours of direct construction, and he says an entire robot takes about 500 hours.

"With thousands of parts, this is not something simple that I gather; I am either in the gym or I am building a robot,” says Kokis.

He goes to the gym several times a week to keep up, because some of his teammates weigh nearly 200 pounds. However, he says it is all worth it. 

"I have different kind of crazy interactions when I'm inside of a robot based on people and it's people, it's just a lot of fun and very interesting,” says Kokis. “I used to be a bit of a shy guy; it was more comfortable for me to perform out in public when I had a helmet on, but the Mermaid Parade, now it is gone so hot that I go around with a helmet off now, so if I'm in front of 600,000 people I'm perfectly comfortable."

Kokis promises to return to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island this year.