Mechanical design and control calibration for an interactive animatronic system

Brian Burns, Biswanath Samanta

Research output: Contribution to book or proceedingConference articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Animatronic figures provide key show effects in the entertainment and theme park industry by simulating life-like animations and sounds. There is a need for interactive, autonomous animatronic systems to create engaging and compelling experiences for the guests. The animatronic figures must identify the guests and recognize their status in dynamic interactions for enhanced acceptance and effectiveness as socially interactive agents, in the general framework of humanrobot interactions. The design and implementation of an interactive, autonomous animatronic system in form of a tabletop dragon and the comparisons of guest responses in its passive and interactive modes are presented in this work. The purpose of this research is to create a platform that may be used to validate autonomous, interactive behaviors in animatronics, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods of guest response. The dragon capabilities include a four degreesof- freedom head, moving wings, tail, jaw, blinking eyes and sound effects. Human identification, using a depth camera (Carmine from PrimeSense), an open-source middleware (NITE from OpenNI), Java-based Processing and an Arduino microcontroller, has been implemented into the system in order to track a guest or guests, within the field of view of the camera. The details of design and fabrication of the dragon model, algorithm development for interactive autonomous behavior using a vision system, the experimental setup and implementation results under different conditions are presented.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDynamics, Vibration, and Control
PublisherAmerican Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
ISBN (Electronic)9780791857403
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
EventASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, IMECE 2015 - Houston, United States
Duration: Nov 13 2015Nov 19 2015

Publication series

NameASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, Proceedings (IMECE)
Volume4B-2015

Conference

ConferenceASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, IMECE 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHouston
Period11/13/1511/19/15

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