GoonQuad, an Emotive Quadruped

thingiverse

This week, my students in Computing in the Creative Arts showcased their term projects through a public exhibit. Among them was an interactive robot project that I find particularly special, as it involved students with minimal technical background but great passion for creating emotion-expressive and interactive robots. The students involved were Lauren Abramsky, Kristy Titanic, and Jesse Shaw. Videos of the robot in action can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqIDKVA1GFA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB8393kkLGA. The quadruped has 4 prerecorded states ("angry", "party", "confused", "breathe"), triggered by the touch of a person on specified areas with capacitive sensors made using bare conductive pen. The robot is powered by a Power Distribution Board, Arduino Mega, 8 Analog Feedback Servos, Zippy Flightmax 1000mAh 15C battery, Bare Conductive Pen, 3x 10M Ohm Resistors, 3 PushButtons, and 4 RGB Leds. All parts were 3D printed on a replicator 2x using the provided .stl files. Arduino code for the project can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/vq7j245edorlk0y/robot.ino. The current state of the robot uses two separate sketches, one for pre-recorded motions and another for recording motions. Additional code and a single combined code will be uploaded at a later time.