Abha’s Status Update for April 25

This week, I mostly worked on assembling the robot. I also helped Jade collect data for speech recognition accuracy.

First, I assembled the head and body of the robot. I put all of the electronics inside them and made sure everything still worked. One minor change I would make if I had time to resolve the issue in another iteration of the robot would be the size of the display screen. Because of the HDMI cable to the side of the display, the current dimensions of the head is the small width possible. However, the face shown on the display is not in proportion with the size of the head. If I had time to iterate on the robot again, I would try to fix the proportions of the relative size of the head and face.

One major issue was that since the microphone was inside the box, it was not picking up user input as much or as accurately anymore. My solution to this problem was to disguise the microphone as one of the paws of the robot. I made a similar shaped paw out of clay for the other paw. This worked very well.

The next major component was the arms. Unfortunately, the servos that I had did not have enough torque for the arm. I used the Lego Mindstorm motors instead, since that is what I had at home. However, I can not integrate them with the story-telling component. This is not a big deal because we did not have robot arm integration as part of our MVP.

Finally, I worked on small aesthetics and a paint job for the robot.

Overall, I think that because I was involved with hardware-software integration between Jade’s and Ashika’s components (since my hardware would be used for the final product), I needed to work closely with them over the past few weeks to integrate their components together. Before COVID-19, I would have barely been part of this integration. Unfortunately, this cost me valuable time in terms of making the robot. Even though I was able to build a robot within the time and resource constraints, I did not have time to iterate and improve my design, and if I had had time, I have a few ideas on what I could have improved.