If you are doing a senior design project in engineering school, it takes some guts to make a robotic duplicate of the school’s president. He or she might be flattered, or completely offended. Us? We laughed out loud. Check out the video below. Spoiler: the nose/moustache wiggle at the end kills us every time.
The project uses a variety of parts including a plastic mask, an Erector set, and the obligatory Arduino with an MP3 shield. There are many articulated parts including eyes, nose, mouth, and wiggly moustache. The face uses RC servos, although [gtoombs] says he’d use stepper motors next time for smoother motion.
The mouth synchronizes to the audio, although this is hard coded, so it would take some work to make the face speak arbitrary speech. Still, it would be possible with a little work.
Humanoid robots are often as much art as technology. Of course, if you build robots–no matter how inhuman they look–you may have to worry about rule 34.
Check out Ben Heck’s “Internet Troll” build. He goes through how to make a puppet’s mouth move with audio from a headset. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoHnQplTMlA
you can also add a depth camera like kinect to make the eyes track the viewer, it makes the face feel more alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQdzZsghveo
I can’t tell where on the uncanny valley this one belongs. If they put that head on a quadracopter I’m running. Skynet had to start somewhere.
I do think they did a good job on the mechanical side. It looks very customizable.