Hello Hello Robot community,
I am pleased to present a project I worked on while at Oregon State University. This project was developed by Sean Buchmeier and myself (Rafael Morales).
The project involves a custom LED module designed for integration with the Stretch robot. This module features two primary functionalities:
- The display of various emotional states (e.g., sad, angry, happy, confused).
- Enhanced gaze capabilities, achieved through the utilization of the tilt-pan camera. This camera captures the position of the motors, and the extracted data is used to align the LED eyes with the direction of the robot camera.
Bellow are some GIF demonstrating the futures! (my apologies if they come of a bit pixelated, I can only upload 4MB files).
The module consist of a Arduino Mega and a BTF-Lighting 8cm*32cm LED strip (link below to the amazon store: https://a.co/d/6l0Y1tK
The codes and 3D files can be found in my github: GitHub - raff17/Stretch_Expressive_Eyes: We created a custom LED eye module that has expressions and is able to follow (gaze objects) using the Pan-tilt head camera.
The LED module operates based on three primary components:
- Data Collection Script: This script gathers information from the camera motors.
- Arduino Firmware: This code facilitates communication between the camera data and the Arduino, enabling the activation of the LED lights.
- Control Interface: This software allows for teleoperation of the robot, managing its movements and interactions.
I hope this helps researchers that would like to add more personality to Stretch!