Fritz - A Robotic Puppet

We just launched our kickstarter project called Fritz which is an open source animatronic robotic head. Its a great way to get introduced into robotics and have some fun with expressions and servo control. The software will also be open source and can be used to sequence the robot to perform actions/etc. based on audio.

We wanted to make a hackable animatronic head that you can change both hardware and software to customize to your personality. The hardware construction is simple but creates a compelling face. We searched for easy to use software to sequence the face using a drag and drop interface ... which we didn't find so we ended up creating our own. As the stock Arduino servo lib only works with 12 servos we also had to upgrade that to get 13 servos so that we could continue to use a stock Arduino for maximum extendibility.

Some highlights
- Humanoid Face Dimensions
- 13 Moveable Facial Parts
- Open Source Hardware and Software
- Arduino Microcontroller Based
- Control Fritz using GUI Drag and Drop Interface
- Included Audio and Motion editor
- Generate Speech from Text
- Control Fritz Using the Keyboard or a Joystick

We are laser cutting the parts but some of the harder bits (like the eye lids) have to be injection molded to make them work in a nice way (3D printing works too but is a bit slow).

The kickstarter project is located at

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1591853389/fritz-a-robotic-puppet

Hope you like it!