An adorable, evil robot overlord conceptualized by a group of three. Then I designed, modelled, printed and added animatronic elements to.
Turi was a part of my final university project, where we had to design and build an interface for a cocktail robot.
Our project was of three key parts, first an individual research and concepting phase, secondly a group concept and finally the actual prototype of that concept.
For my research I looked into what makes a good bar/cocktail experience and why, how do animators like the ones at Pixar and Dreamworks create relatable and emotive characters of, anything really and finally what robots exist now and how have they been designed to work within the human environment.
From this research I developed three concepts. The first, the cocktail robot, in the form of the Kuka robotic arm, was simply hidden behind a curtain, whereby the audience would be in a position of mystery and discovery; is it really a robot? Until the robotic arm pushes through the curtain and pours the cocktail. The second, the cocktail robot is hidden behind paper screens, backlit as a silhouette; an ambiguous and suggestive nature to the scene, which is revealed through windows punched through by the robot. The final concept was to use eyes placed onto the robotic arm, to bring it to life.
We later formed a team, Kate, Natalie and myself, as we had similar ideas with personifying/bringing personality into the interaction. We came up with the idea of having a smaller character who you would interact with, smaller and more approachable, who’d take the order and relay it to the larger Kuka robot. I then designed the character Turi, an adorable, cute, evil robotic overlord, a lord of sass and malicious charm.
I then modelled it up in 3DS Max. The next step was to design spots for servos to fit within the model itself and other mechanical requirements. We wanted the arms to be able to move up and down, the head to turn side to side, the jaw to open and close and the body to turn side to side. I measured the servos we’d be using with calipers and made space within the character for these to fit.
Next was print time, due to the size of Turi we needed to run multiple prints and split the model up, the head alone turned into 7 pieces, 2 arms, 2 halves of the body and the feet. The parts were printed in PLA and I used a number of different methods to join them back up. But first was to put in the servos. At first to get the right alignment and range of motion I used blu-tak to hold the servos in place, as we tinkered with the movement and the arduino code. I fixed these into place with a healthy dose of hot glue and then a little more. For the jaw I drilled a small hole at the end of the spike and used a bent paper clip to join it to the servo which was placed in the back of the head similarly with a lot of hot glue. To create the pivot point for the jaw I used two small lengths of a paper clip inserted into either side of the jaw part and created a ledge for the jaw to sit on within the insides of the head. The next method I used is called friction welding, PLA doesn’t bond particularly well with most super glues, it also wouldn’t fill the small gaps between the different printed parts which had warped due to lifting off the print bed. So using a small length of PLA filament in the end of a rotary tool (in my case a dremel) spinning against the seam you want to join, heats the filament and seam, melting the plastic and bonding the two parts as if they were printed as a whole.
Due to the amount of wires and the weight of the whole assembly, we omitted the bottom pivot, so the body could no longer turn and instead welded the legs to the body and fed the wires up through them
I then built a stand or plinth for Turi to sit atop, this had enough space internally to house all the electronics, such as the servos, arduino's, power supply and laptop. I used some standard sized lengths of pine to create the frame and some 3mm plywood to encase it. I didn’t have any proper measurements or plans to go off, other than a few rough measurements of how much space the laptop needed, how long the wires were and how high we wanted Turi’s eyes to sit at. So with a rough sketch to run off, I planned it as I went which resulted in a bit of use of wood filler. The back of the plinth was left open so we could still access it and tinker with the electronics inside as needed, we covered this with an opaque black cloth. I painted the plinth a semi-gloss black that really showed off the angles in the light and yet maintained an approachable shape, yet sophisticated and luxurious.
On the night of the prototype demonstration, things went as smoothly as they could for a first complete live testing. We’d tested before with the kuka arm, however not with the cocktails themselves. We had the jaw fall out a few times when Turi was doing its movements, but other than that it was a great success for a live demonstration of our prototype and first project of this kind.
I also modelled some smaller Turis, that had a likeness to the members of the team. These were around 16 cm tall and had small coloured LED’s in the heads to make the eyes glow. These turned out great and gave us all a little something to take home after the project.
