ICU2, almost there

ICU2 is going to Pavilhão do Conhecimento in February and we are finishing the hardware and software. Some servos needed to be swapped and I needed to print a suport for a standard servo, this video shows a bit of the printing process and the printed thing assembled.

There will me more updates very soon.

ICU . 1.01

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.

ICU v1.01

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.

ICU v1.01

Unfortunately I don’t have any decent video of photos of the Flausina exhibition, I leave you with a video of the bot 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
– everytime a face is detected it will say something on Twitter and upload the picture in an online gallery

Source code can be downloaded here.

All for now.. Roger, over and out.

ICU v1.01

Photo at Flausina.

Artica’s Interactive Slideshow

CCB, Museu Colecção Berardo, Trienal de Arquitectura, Prémios Secil – Interactive SlideShow – 2010 from artica on Vimeo.

Interactive Slideshow created to showcase Secil Prizes. You can see it live @ CCB, Museu Colecção Berardo, Exposição Trienal de Arquitectura.

Inner’s Lair

INNER'S LAIR

Inner’s Lair started with a crazy idea of having an immersive interactive installation that could gather many artistic and computational topics that we at Artica have been disccussing in the last months. So, mostly we wanted to tryout our new conceptual implementation of cool topics as immersive sound, computer vision, interactive robotics, and organic behaviors.

INNER'S LAIR

Meanwhile POP UP Lisboa 2010 came up and I was invited to apply a purposal for an instalation, and I thought that Inner’ Lair could be a great challenge for me and André Almeida, and a great opportunity to promote ARTICA interactive and technological solutions.

So, all the conditions where in place, we have this great idea and a great place to show it. Due to the complexity of the project we assume that it would be shown as a WIP (work in progress). This way we stablished several steps, to setup sound, all the set, computer vision system and robotics.

We will be all the saturdays (except 27th, wich we will be there in 28th) working on-site until the end of Pop Up. After the end of the event we intend to continue this WIP on another place. If you know a place to show this creation we will be glad to know.

This saturday (13 of November) was really fun, we had a lot of friends passing by willing to give us a hand, lots of visitors asking what we where doing, we had such a good time.

INNER'S LAIR

INNER'S LAIR

This is the current state of Inner’s Lair, robots still don’t move, but they will ;)

INNER'S LAIR

ICU . I See You

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.