In 2021, Ben Howard had the idea use an old self driving food delivery robot into an animatronic piano playing puppet and drive it around the city, a la Vanessa Carlton’s famous music video.

Mechanically, the puppet consists of three assemblies – the puppet body and two hand movers which manipulate the hands via rods (like a typical muppet).

The puppet body contains servo motors controlling 6 axes of motion – body forward / back lean, shoulder rotation, head rotation, head tilt, and upper / lower jaws. The jaws are moved in tandem to create head pitch, or opposite to open and close the mouth.

Each hand mover is an azimuth / elevation mounted servo pair connected to a carbon fiber rod affixed to the puppet hand. Horizontally, the puppet hand moves in a slight arc rather than linearly down the keyboard.

See the video below and more in the post here.