I do stop motion animation and I've always had in the back of my mind if it was posible to make a robot out of a stop motion puppet puppet and do some of the more intricate "stunts" with a robot vs by hand. As you can see from the images included, the joints on this are pretty small. I was wondering if anyone has any ideas of hardware that might work for this sort of thing or if alternatively a separate mechanism that would drive the puppet would be the prefered alternative. Out of the box thinking encouraged!!! Any info--specially with pictures included--would be appreciated.
You effectively want to make a mini humanoid robot. There would actually not be any reason to try to use the skeleton of the puppet since it would not help adding actuators but rather hinder it. The smallest actuators would be muscle wires, but they provide very little force and are not too fast. There are micro linear actuators similar to:
If you want tech used in other humanoid robots, you would need to consider servo motors, which, although small, might be bulky for that small of a drame.
