Design and implementation of a projection seeking robot

Abstract

A design project on the development of an interactive robot system for display in the MIT Museum Studio gallery. The system consists of a moving projection surface, a projector, and an external camera with motion detection. When the external camera senses motion in the hallway outside of the gallery, it takes a picture. If a face is visible in the image, the image is cropped and displayed on the projector. The external controller notifies the moving surface that it should try to orient itself within a projection field. The projection surface uses its internal camera to continuous take images through the translucent projection material and determines whether it or not it needs to move to be within the projection field. Through this series of interactions, the robot essentially "borrows" the faces of those who pass the studio, catching projected imagery of their faces on the "face" of the projection surface. With this interaction in mind, the projection surface was designed to mimic human qualities, with an abstract head, neck, and organic body. This thesis encompasses the design and documentation of the physical robot, as well as the design and programming of one series of interactions that could be performed by this robot. This thesis represents a snapshot of the current progress of this project. Besides performing the interaction sequence described above, a secondary goal of this project is to a create an easily programmable and well documented project that future students of the MIT Museum Studio can modify for new displays and projects.