Irish Robotic Pet Project
Description
This project was completed during my freshman year intro to engineering class in the fall of 2010. The project involved designing a robot pet using Lego NXT for 5th graders based on their input. The project concluded with a class competition and the winners presented their project at a local elementary school where the students could interact with our final project.
Individual Contributions
My individual contributions to this project involved gathering customer data, turning the data into pet features, building the physical robot, and troubleshooting programming issues.
Approach
Gathering Customer Data
The first step of this project was to gather customer input to decide on what pet to build and determine what features were important to the 5th graders. We began this step with an ice breaker building with legos and talking about what animals they like. More specific questions helped spark their imagination to build off of our suggestions. We determined that they wanted an out of the ordinary pet that entertains them, performs a funny trick, and does some of the normal animal activities.
Moving from Data to an Idea
Taking the input we got from the 5th graders, we chose a penguin as our out of the ordinary pet. Flapping wings and squawking would be the normal animal features with entertainment coming from a dance the penguin would perform. We designed a funny trick for the pet by having the penguin slide on his belly.
Building the Robot Pet
Designing the shape of our penguin given the NXT brick proved to be an interesting challenge. We needed to include all of our features, but still have the robot look like a penguin. Using the sonar and sound sensor, we were able to simulate a beak and eye balls. Adding wheels to the shoulder of the NXT allowed us to have the penguin slide on its belly. This proved to be the hardest trick to program. We came up with a program that increased the speed to increase the momentum when the penguin braked so that it could tip over on its belly and continue moving forward. A diagram of our sensors and penguin is shown below.
Results
Our final pet and a demonstration video is shown below. We won the best in section competition and were able to present our penguin at the local school. The students enthusiastic response was a great reward at the end of the project. They loved seeing some of their suggestions make it into the final pet.
