I´ve following for a while InMoov
project. It´s an open source humanoid robot from French designer Gaël Langevin,
who has done a great job accomplishing a nice and stylish robot.
Two years ago I started working as a full time lecturer at the Costa
Rica Institute of Technology, I see this project as an engagement tool to attract
high school students into STEM majors at college.
InMoov website has detailed construction videos, bills of materials and stl
files for the 3D printed parts. We 3D printed all those head parts and follow the
assembly instructions. We took special care on the outside parts to make our
robot look extra cool, so we applied automotive primer sealer and carefully
sanded everything to get that nice and smooth finish, then we painted it
white. For the eyes I followed Gaël's design on using a thermoplastic material to
cover the eye balls to make them look glossy and shiny. It really enhances the
appearance of the robot.
On InMoov webpage the control of the robot is done by a software called MyRobotLab,
however I decided to just used and Arduino. I also used 3 shields above the Arduino,
one to power all the servos and 2 of them for the joysticks.
The robot has 2 servos on the eyes
to make a 2 dimensional movement, one servo to open-close the jaw and 2
servos on the neck. Currently there’s only 1 servo running on the neck, I
expect to mount the remaining one soon.
My first job on the Arduino code was to set the center of each servo and
the limits they can reach before something breaks. Then I put some code to map
the joystick positions (they are just potentiometers) and map those movements
as an increment/decrement on servo position.
Future work on the Robot Head is will be making a strong and nice
looking head base (not a cardboard box ;) ) and installing in it the missing neck
servo. Then we want to start merging this robot with a chatbot done by an
investigator at the university, and hopefully we will have a talking robot!
