Queen’s University’s School of Computing in Ontario, Canada seems like one of the funnest places to earn a degree. Every year, students put on an expo titled Creative Computing: Arts, Games, and Research, in which undergraduate and graduate students display their exciting projects. Live, hands-on demonstrations provide the local community with up close and personal opportunities to see what these young, creative minds are coming up with. This year, one such project was GoonQuad, a 3D-printed, emotive quadruped robot.
With the help of Antoino Gomes and Paul Strohmeier, undergraduates Lauren Abramsky,
Kristy Titanic and Jesse Shaw set about creating a simple robot capable of expressing emotion. They planned to model their machine after an organism found in nature, choosing the starfish for its simple anatomy.
The students then began prototyping their robot, deciding that it could express emotion partially through the movement of its limbs and through colourful lights. Soon, they realized that four legs would be simpler and just as effective as five, opting for a quadruped design.
With a bit of programming, they were able to build a robot capable of showing five different emotions, through light and movement, using servo motors, capacitive sensors and 3D printed parts. Additionally, Lauren, Kristy and Jesse have begun a method for training GoonQuad. he robot can record motions in one leg and play them back through all four. For a better understanding of how the little creature works, see below:
For now, GoonQuad is tethered to a computer, but the students hope to transfer the robot’s brain to an Arduino board. If you want to help push the project further yourself, all of the bot’s designs are open source, including the .stl files for GoonQuad’s legs and body. You can find all of the files and instructions for building your own GoonQuad at Instructables! May this little robot reproduce and take over the world!
Source: Instructables
