Virgen Chicotropica

Introduction

The project was developed for the III chicotropico festival, in Matadero de Madrid at Sep the 11th, 2011, before the end of the world…

It is a robot based on an ancient doll as a sacred-robot installed in an altar giving blessings to the public.

This page describes the process of construction including structural, electronic and control aspect.

Structural Aspect

Arms

Arms are moved by servos of size: 28.8 x 13.8 x 30.2mm. The servo axis is screwed in the arm by a plastic piece.

Eyelids

Below the wig, there is a big hole that give access to the movement mechanism of the doll eyelids. Blue LEDs are used inside the ocular ball to give some emotional expression. A mini/servo is used inside the head for moving the eyelids mechanism.

Legs, Eyes, Heart

In the legs we use high luminosity white LEDs. As the plastic material of doll is translucid, there is an interesting illuminating effect in the whole leg. A heart was built putting 3 red LEDs in a triangle. The control system implements a beating function of the heart.In the following figures you can see when the heart is on or off.

Electronic Aspect

The power system allows batteries and a power supply. There are two parallel supply lines: one with high power that gives to the servos up to 2A; and another one of low power for the LEDs and the control system. A 5V regulator is used. The input voltage range goes from 9V to 12V.

Control.

The control system is based on a loop that reads the sensor values, makes some calculations and writes to the actuators: LEDs and servos.

Actions Domain

The DoF of the robot are:

Gesture Expression System

Pseudo-Concurrency

As it is not possible to program threads in Arduino at this moment, concurrency is simulated as the following figure shows:

Each gesture point execution is writen to the actuator at a time, in a way that the algorithm goes for one DoF to the next executing the corresponing actuator value for the same time.

Github Code

GitHub virgen_chicotropica project.