ICU . I See You

* --------------------- June 17, 2011 ---------------------------- *

ICU has been sleeping for a while but was awaken suddenly because I was invited to an exhibition at Flausina, a new born association in Lisbon.

Complexity is always a welcome thing around here and the bot was presented with two more servo motors and all the software has been re-written. And because I needed to simulate its movements I coded an application in Processing in a way that I could test all the non-dangerous angles. Inverse kinematics is way to advanced for my taste and I think I can call this a “forward kinematics simulator”. This simulator gives also the possibility to generate individual sine waves for each motor, minimum and maximum range of motion, an interpolator for smoothness and frequency for speed.

Unfortunately I don’t have any decent video of photos of the Flausina exhibition, you can see on the 3rd video recorded in the office with the processing application.

TODO list:

- capability to save presets
- timeline with keyframes, play and stop buttons
- upgrade this servos to more powerful and digital servos
- upgrade all the structure to enhance weight distribution
- create a mask in silicon/rubber and give this bot a crazy new look

Source code can be downloaded here.

All for now.. Roger, over and out.

Photo at Flausina.

* --------------------- July 21, 2010 ---------------------------- *

ICU is a sub-project of the SWARS (see what a robot sees) project.

This time I not just wanted to see what a robot sees, but I also wanted to give the robot the ability to understand that there is a person in the room, and stare at the person.

To detect faces I used the OPENCV library for Processing, wich turns out to be very fun to work with and is very sensitive to human faces.. and sometimes it detect faces where there aren’t any.. maybe it is a ghost face detector algorythm!!

I didn’t have time to work with the four motors, I am only working with the two servo motors on the top. Next step will be to apply inverse kinematics and have a better level of interactivity.

Unfortunately I had to pick the computer that was being used in this installation, I will need it in the next weeks, but this bot will be available to the public very soon I promise!!

This is the code I am using if someone wants to look at it, you will need to have the MegaServo library installed for the Arduino sketch, and the OPENCV lib for the Processing sketch.