This week my students from Computing in the Creative Arts had a public exhibit of their term projects. This project is close to my heart as I worked closely with this particular group of students who despite having very little technical background were deeply passionate about creating an interactive robot capable of expressing emotions and interacting with people.
The students involved were
Lauren Abramsky,
Kristy Titanic,
Jesse Shaw
I have submitted this project to the robots and arduino contests.
I present you “Goon Quad”. In this version, Goon Quad has 4 prerecorded states (“angry”,”party”,”confused”,”breathe”), triggered by the touch of a person in areas specified by the eyebrows and a tattoo that read “Mom”, painted with bare conductive and used as capacitive sensors.
To enable the robot to record new motions, 8 analog feedback servos were used. As of now, we are only using one leg to record and translating it into the remaining 3. v2 will feature a fully programmable robot. Here’s an example of the recording motion in action (1st video just arms, 2nd video arms and base) In the step by step I will provide all the .stl files and early iterations of the robot.
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