Summer 2009: "Bot Controller" for mimicking head movements and facial expressions
During my summer internship in the Rainbow Graphics and Interaction research group at University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, I developed an application for controlling robots and allowing them to mimic head movements and facial expressions.
"Bot Controller is an open-source cross-platform (Windows, Linux, OS X) program to control robots through an Arduino-style board.
It contains:
- an easily-extendible library of Bot movements
- a simple GUI that displays the library methods and runs them on click
- a TCP server that accepts remote executions of library methods, with optional mapping of execution commands to library methods
Bot Controller is made available under the GNU GPL 3 license. It is available for download here.
Bot Controller can be connected to MindReader to allow robots to mimic face expressions."
Bot Controller gained publicity by being demoed at the HCI 2009 conference in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory with the robot Elvis, which I wired up during the summer internship.
Press coverage:
Elvis running autonomously and interacting with passerbys on their way to see Blade Runner. Guardian blog post and photos.