I am currently in Taiwan where Chinese is the lingua franca. I do not speak Chinese! Whenever, I try to communicate with my Chinese friends, all interaction is dependent upon my phone. I want to interact with Chinese speakers through a much more exciting medium: an animatronic robot.
The goal of this project is to build a friendly robot that can complete a variety of communication tasks: translation, interpretation, suggestions, comedy!
Quick demo of the robot speaking and movement of the eyes, eye lids, and neck. There are some latency issues that need to be resolved as the audio is not in sync with the display output (sin wave).
I had the chance to demonstrate RobotGPT at the Taipei Makerfaire. The robot exhibit was pretty popular and a lot of Taiwanese folk has fun interacting with it. In particular, elders found it to be an accessible way to play with AI tools for the first time.
I went through the process of creating the lens for the eye. Even after extensive sanding of the eyes, I was not happy with the surface finish. For future iterations, I will need to print the mold positive with a finer layer resolution. Tbh, it kind of looks like the eyes have cataracts.
Conceptualization and design work for this project. By end of week, I want a deliverable of a detailed CAD mockup and ready to print mechanism for eyes.
I am in Taiwan until November 30. Ideally, I want to present this project at MakerFaire Taiwan on November 18th. Also I am going to Saudi Arabia from October 30th - November 5th. Oh and I also want to finish my BabelFish glasses at some point. Essentially, I have no time to get this project done. But unreasonable schedules are my forte!!
Below I have outlined a rough timetable of how I want to complete this project:
Schedule
October 16th - October 20th
Conceptual design work
October 23rd - October 27th
Make eye mechanism
Make mouth interface
Film short reel of animatronic robot saying ni-hao
A few months ago, I saw this well edited YouTube video:
The robot in this video is simply a work of art! I want to build a similar robot geared specifically for translation purposes. Instead of always asking my Taiwanese friends to translate for me, I can refer to this robot!
The centerpiece of this robot is definitely the eye mechanism. They were expertly designed as an open-source project by Will Cogley. In terms of the mouth, I defintely want something that is visually embedded with the robot acoustics but I do not want to plagarize this project entirely. Considering that this is supposed to be a translator bot, I should probably add a section where viewers can read the robot's speech in both english and chinese.