Animatronics is a cross between animation and electronics. Basically, an animatronic is a mechanized puppet. It may be preprogrammed or remotely controlled. An abbreviated term originally coined by Walt Disney as “Audio-Animatronics” (used to describe his mechanized characters), can actually be seen in various forms as far back as Leonardo-Da-Vinci’s Automata Lion, (theoretically built to present lillies to the King of France during one of his Visits),and has now developed as a career which may require combined talent in Mechanical Engineering , Sculpting / Casting, Control Technologies, Electrical / Electronic, Airbrushing, Radio-Control.
The subject of animatronics, emotional display and recognition has evolved into a major industry and has become more efficient through new technologies. Animatronics is constantly changing due to rapid advancements and trends that are taking place in hardware and software section of the industry. The purpose of this research was to design and build an animatronics robot that will enable students to investigate current trends in robotics. This paper seeks to highlight the debate and discussion concerning engineering challenge that mainly involved secondary level students.
This paper explores the hardware and software design of animatronics and emotional face displays of robots. Design experience included artistic design of the robot, selection of actuators, mechanical design, and programming of the animatronics robot. Students were challenged to develop models with the purpose of creating interest in learning Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
It is possible for us to build our own animatronics by making use of ready-made animatronic kits provided by companies such as Mister Computers where no programming skills are required. Only knowledge of Windows is required.
Animatronics was developed by Walt Disney in the early sixties. Essentially, an animatronic puppet is a figure that is animated by means of electromechanical devices . Early examples were found at the 1964 World Fair in the New York Hall of Presidents and Disney Land. In the Hall of Presidents, Lincoln, with all the gestures of a statesman, gave the Gettysburg’s address. Body language and facial motions were matched to perfection with the recorded speech. Animatronics was a popular way of entertainment that had proven itself in the theme parks and cinematography industry
Animatronics is a subset of anthropomorphic robots which are designed drawing inspiration from nature. The most recent advancement in building an anthropomorphic robot is Kismet (earlier developed by MIT), that engages people in expressive face-to-face interaction. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolutionary perspective, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse scientific viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a person, reminiscent of adult infant exchanges. Kismet perceives a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels, and delivers social signals to people through gaze direction, facial expression, body posture, and vocalization.
There is a great deal of research around the world recently in Japan on developing of interactive robots with a human face. Development of interactive human like robot brings this research to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, materials, robotics, and psychology. Machines displaying emotions is a relatively new endeavor that goes far back to earlier times. The entertainment field is also overlapping new research on androids; the term android is derived from fiction relating to a complete mechanical automation.
An extension of the engineering challenge is to explore the effectiveness of the project’s
capability to display human emotions, and to design the physical mechanisms that display realistic human facial movements. The objective of this effort was to design and build an animatronic robot SSU-1 (Savannah State University-1). The SSU-1 will be controlled by a preprogrammed embedded microcontroller and will create human like motions for entertainment purposes.
REFERENCE:-
v http://www.animatronics.org/
v http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-create-simple-animatronics-using-the-MAKE-c/
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