This is the original request for help in making the robot.
Hi Andrew,
Some initial questions:
(1) What is the timing for your need?
(2) Roughly how tall would it be?
(3) What is your budget on a scale from fancy to down-and-dirty?
Most of us have day jobs and more HIVE project ideas than time. A team
effort with some coordination and planning would be great. If you
can't fund the time, funding the agreed out-of-pocket expenses would
be a minimum. In this mode, things don't happen so quick.
Member Jon recently brought in some appropriate wheel chair motors.
With some mechanical parts and drive circuits we could have a light-
weight bot like your picture (let's say about 5 foot tall) that moved
around a room trailing some (hidden?) wires back to the operator with
the remote control pendant. We could fab up one (or both) pretty
fancy robot-type life-size arm and hand with fingers from laser cut
acrylic parts. The fastest way to drive all the hand joints would be
with hand-pulled tension cables manipulated off-camera from the
shoulder joint and the back of the body while the robot was stationary
in a closeup. Moving arms while the robot was "walking" is more of an
engineering effort and likely includes more motors and such (time and
$). We've been doodling with some ping-pong ball size eye ball
tracking mechanisms (look up, down, left right) with eyebrows and
eyelids that could be expressive with your oscilloscope mouth idea.
We can talk,
Jim (+ a tbd team)