Wiggly

By Selma Storstad og Sivert Strand

1) Animatronics

You know when you¡¯re watching a Pixar movie and you see a really cute robot, and you can¡¯t help but smile? Or when something happens to the robot and you suddenly feel sad for it, even though it¡¯s made of metal and pixels? That emotional connection is what inspired us.

Our motivation for this project stems from a fascination with how robots can express emotions and build more natural connections with humans. We want to explore what makes a robot feel human like, not through complex speech or perfect movement, but through small, expressive details like a tilt of the head, a blink, or a color change that reflects how it ¡°feels.¡±

2) Goals

The goal of this project is to design a small, expressive robot capable of detect and express emotions.

Some sources of Inspiration to our project.

Cleaning Robot from Wall-E

The cleaning robot from WALL-E is a very expressive character. With just his eye and body movements, he makes it very obvious how he¡¯s feeling. The eyes, in particular, convey a lot of emotional information, helping the robot connect more naturally with humans.^1

Bipedal Robotic Character

The BDX Droid, designed by Disney Entertainment, is an expressive bipedal robot created to bring their fictional robots to life. One of its main goals is to make the robot more interactive and appealing to the humans around it.^2

3) Sketch

This robot is composed of multiple layers that can move independently. Each layer is shaped like an oblique cylinder, and by rotating these layers relative to one another, the robot can tilt in different directions. This tilting motion enables the robot to move along the X and Y axes while standing upright along the Z axis. The movement of the robot is driven by AX-12 servos, each of which drives a gear connected to one layer. Each motor rotates the layer above it. An LED strip is mounted inside the robot¡¯s frame, shining through the slim outer body to create a diffuse lighting effect. On the front of the head, there will be two OLED screens that act as eyes, along with a Raspberry Pi camera to capture faces. Everything is controlled by a Raspberry Pi mounted in the head due to space constraints.

4) Bill of materials (BOM)

Create a table with the most important components for your setup.

5) Plan