Outcome

Objectives

The Threatened Owl was an offshoot of project attempted to provide a more engaging interaction from the audience, but found that exploring how an animal fends off engagement was far more interesting. The goal of the project then became attempting to build a robot that could perform, at least in part, like a threatened bird. Therefore, size and performance were evaluated, and visual tracking and wing actuation were necessary features. The size of the bird would serve to add to its performance in a subtle fashion. Complete modeling of the wing of a bird is outside the scope of this project due to time constraints and given that my background is not in biology or osteology. However, I do have an interest in the intersection of geometry and behavior and how they affect each other and so the world of animals is a familiar and convenient place to begin.

Implementation

In the animal world, when seeking to avoid conflict, animals make themselves as large as they can and sometimes become very grand in gesture in order to express energy and control over that energy. In this way they communicate that they are not worth the effort to attack. Therefore, I sought to make the bird large in size and actuate its wings upon detecting teeth. In addition to this, I implemented “eye contact” to the best of my ability. Eye contact in the animal world is very aggressive. Especially when the animal is threatened, it is focused on the potential attacker. For this reason, the owl’s gaze follows the individual closest to it in its presence. With more time, the owl would be constructed more convincingly as an owl with a larger diversity of movements when threatened. In this way, the owl would more closely approximate reality.

Outcomes

The owl performed well. Its wings actuated to the degree expected and on cue. When the owl was not longer able to view the human, it paused in caution and when the owl could “see” the human again it began again its threatened dance. The size of the bird made it far more fierce than had it been smaller and the noise of the stepper motor made it sound additionally aggressive, despite not being an intended feature. In addition, it managed to keep the aggressor in its gaze for the range of motion acceptable from the neck of an owl. The exposure of the actuators did not aid in the convincing power of the robot, and made clear the necessities of creating skin or shelling for a robot. Making the skin more closely approximate the reality of the animal I am seeking to model makes the model more seemingly real. This can be seen in the design of stuffed animals.

Photo Documentation

Figure 1: Full Image of the Owl

Figure 2: Right Wing Construction, Depicting the Mechanics

Figure 3: Owl's Head and Neck, Depicting the Mechanics

Figure 4: Internal Circuitry of the Owl

Video Documentation

Video

Technical Documentation

Figure 5: Brainstorm Sketch

Figure 6: The Electrical Schematic