Children's Education Robot
Jeffrey Fisher II • Katherine Bernhardt
TAMUmake 2018
TAMUmake is a hardware hackathon hosted every year by the Texas A&M branch of IEEE in which teams compete to create a project in 24 hours. To learn more about this amazing event put on by IEEE please visit the following website: TAMUmake.com
Problem
Many Children at a young age are exposed to STEM related topics, but often are discouraged when it seems too complicated.
Solution
We wanted to make a robot that would use motion capture like control in order to allow a child to animate the movements of a robot. This would create a more playful and fun way to interact with robotic technology, while introducing the ideology behind programming.
Design
Originally we began building the robot out of cardboard and soon realized that the robot didn't look frendly enough for children to latch onto. We decided to 3D print the body of the robot inorder to make it more compact and friendly looking.
We also chose for as much of the robot to be sensors and buttons to make it as interactive as possible. This would enable us to add features that would demonstrate what the sensors do without even having any text based instructions. The goal was to make the robot teach you how to use it instead of needing to read something.
Originally we wanted the arms to be physically movable and would record their desired position. Unfortunately, after hours of work, it was discovered that this was not possible with the servos we were using. Instead we added a button pad that could be used to control the motion of the arms.
To make the robot more interactive and friendly, we made a face which consisted of one eye. The eye was shown on an 8x8 red LED matrix. This eye would react to button presses and sensor detection. If your hand was waved by a motion sensor it would turn its head and look at your hand. It could also display other icons that would allow for you to know what mode it was currently in.
Software
An Arduino Micro was in charge of handling all the sensors and servos. The servos used a library that is provided by arduino to control servos, but everything else was done from scratch. One of the parts that I am the most proud of is the way we programmed the LED matrix. We made many different arrays for different expressions of the eye, like looking right or having the eye closed. This allowed for really rapid creation of different reactions for other parts of the robot.