This animatronic teddy bear is the stuff of nightmares… or dreams if you’re into mutant robot toys. In either case, this project by [Erwin Ried] is charming and creepy, as he gives life to an unassuming stuffed animal by implanting it with motorized parts.

[Erwin] achieves several degrees of motion throughout the bear’s body by filling the skin with a series of 3D printed bones, conjoined by servo motors at its shoulders, elbows and neck. The motors are controlled via an Arduino running slave to a custom application written in C#. This application uses the motion tracking and facial recognition features of the Xbox Kinect, mapping the input from the puppeteer’s movement to the motors of the doll’s skeleton. Additionally, two red LEDs illuminate under the bear’s cheeks in response to the facial expression of the person controlling it, as an additional reminder that teddy feels what you feel.

In [Erwin’s] video, he demonstrates what his application sees through the Kinect’s camera side-by-side with the mechanical skeleton its controlling. The finished product isn’t something I’d soon cuddle up to at night, but looks amazing and is fun to watch in action :

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