The “Dancing Robots” Studio came to a dramatic end last Friday as the four design-build robotics teams rapidly placed the last-minute design and programmatic touches on their robots for their dancing premier. LED lights were carefully placed and coordinated to sequence with varying musical rhythms. Final programming was coded for precise joint movements to accurately mirror famous dance moves. The students worked diligently to bring their robots to life with expressive lights, body paint, clothing, ipod accessories, and even some bushy red hair.

Here, David and Angelo work quickly to install, wire, and program around 40 LED lights onto Deadmau5:
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Design-Build Team: Izzy English, Ginny Hollingsworth, Alex Jacobs, and Taylor Pierce

Our group began the Dancing Robots studio with conflicting ideas. Some members wanted to replicate the NBA player, John Wall, while others wanted to replicate a popular YouTube video called the “Revolution of Dance.” As a conclusion, our group decided that we could combine our two ideas. At the beginning of last week, our plan was to create a robot that resembled John Wall, but who would do the dance in the YouTube video. Our character in the prototype took a turn and ended up becoming a combination of several NBA players, instead of just one; however, we plan to make our final robot resemble just John Wall. Read the rest of this entry »

Design-Build Team: Kayla Guzovsky, Valerian Planche, Anthony Richardson, and Jay Rodman

This project was presented as an opportunity to use the Arduino programming systems to make a dancing robot. My group agreed upon a Turtle as the character for our robot. At first, we had very imaginative ideas that included the turtle having a grappling head to help it climb walls, the ability to do acrobatic stunts, have lasers for eyes, and dance to music that it would play from speakers attached to its shell. Part of our project’s description was to have our robot be interactive. For this part of the project we imagined the turtle being able to react to having music play, people’s touch, and it’s orientation (being upside-down or right-side-up). We were planning on making a very realistic replica of a sea turtle for our general model that would move around on wheels. Read the rest of this entry »

Design-Build Team: Angelo Cabral, Garret Ekpunobi, Max Penzel, and Stephen Phillips

Back in freshmen year, Stephen and I created a character called the “Runch Monster”. He is a giant blob that likes to eat everything and everyone. When we were brainstorming ideas about a robot, we decided that the Runch Monster would be a perfect fit to be a robot. As time went on, we decided to make the Runch Monster moon walk. Later in the week, we found out that the moon walk would not work and as a joke we wanted the robot to just spin around and flash a lot of lights. As we were developing new concepts, we seriously took the “joke” into consideration and actually planned out moves and a light show. Later as we were building the Runch Monster, we noticed that the robot began diverging from the look of the Runch Monster and that it was looking more and more like Deadmau5. The end product turned out to be completely different than we originally imagined because initially we had a moon-walking Runch Monster, and we ended up with Deadmau5, a robot that dances around and is synchronized with a light show. Read the rest of this entry »

Students began the new year with the “Dancing Robots” Studio in the second unit of the Winter “Storytelling” trimester. Led by Sean Stevens, an Alternative Energy Artist and Scientist, and assisted by David Wang, our in-house Rocket Scientist, the studio focuses on designing, building and prototyping robots that can dance and emote based on stories and character descriptions the students develop. The studio integrates concepts surrounding energy and power, robotics, programming and mechanical construction using basic tools and free software, so that students will have the skills and knowledge to quickly design and build robots easily and anywhere!

The first day, students formed four teams and began the design process by brainstorming ideas about the types of actions and functionality desired for their robots. They then further iterated their designs with a focus on the expressiveness of the robot and its character as a guiding design element. Day two, Sean did a quick demo of how to quickly (and messily) prototype robots using basic construction tools, polycarbonate as a raw material, metal screws and servo motors. Students then began building their first prototypes out of cardboard and construction foam. Using servo motors connected to micro controllers that send and receive signals from an open-source, electronics prototyping platform called Arduino, students began testing how to make their robots move, dance and form expressive motions through basic programming. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language. Receiving input from a variety of sensors, Arduino then can be used to control lights, motors, and other actuators on the robots.