Robot Puppets

I had a New Year's resolution to create more robots in 2019, and these puppets were the first ones! They are knitted stuffed animals that I turned into marionettes. Each puppet has three position servos. One moves the legs, one moves the arms, and one turns the puppet from side to side. Each puppet has a separate Hummingbird Bit board, and I use bluetooth to connect to all three from the BlueBird Connector. That lets me control all three robots from Snap! (or Python or Java, but I used Snap! here).

It started with the tiny robot pattern in this book by Rebecca Danger. I made a few for Christmas last year, and I liked them so much that I decided to make a big one.

I wanted to try making it a marionette, so I put weights (pennies) in the hands and feet, and based on an internet how-to video,  I used string and popsicle sticks to create a simple marionette I could control by hand.

 

After trying out the marionette by hand, I worked on using motors to get similar motions. I had to make the control bar for the arms really long to get the necessary range of motion with the servo, since it can only move 180°. After I got it right for one robot, I was ready to replicate it so I could have three robots do some synchronized dancing.

Since the robots are programmed in Snap!, you can write a program for a fixed dance to music, or you can program them to interact with their environment. For an event at Assemble in Pittsburgh, I programmed the robots to respond to video motion. Snap! 5 contains blocks that use the laptop camera to measure the amount of motion across a sprite. By setting up three sprites for each robot, I used motion across different areas of the screen to control the arms, legs, and turn for each robot puppet. The code for each sprite looked like this. I created my own blocks to control the movements of each robot. The kids at Assemble were happy to test it out for me, though at least one was more impressed by the knitting than the technical part.