Outcomes

Building a life-size robot was pretty integral to the goals of the robot. Keeping the robot large meant that the interactions with it could be more easily related to human-scale movements. However, keeping the robot large meant that we were constantly challenged with ways of distributing the weight in order to use the smaller scale components available to us. We spent a lot of time designing and developing a bearing that would allow us to place heavier loads for the arms and drive them from a NEMA-17 stepper motor. The time we spent on this, as well as developing a way to support each drive plate meant that we lost time on the behavior end. Overall, the size and scale of the robot, as well as what movement we were able to achieve definitely aided in the objectives of the robot. We also were able to get gestures on the Kinect to move the robot as we intended, but because we did not have time to really experiment with those behaviors, it was still difficult for a user to see what impact they were having on the robot.