Construction
There are approximately sixty motors in the small space of the robot body that make the expressive movement of the robot possible. The Personal Robot Group developed the motor control systems (with both 8-axis and 16-axis control packages) that they’ve used for Leonardo. Leonardo does not resemble any real creature, but instead has the appearance of a fanciful being. Its face was designed to be expressive and communicative since it is a social robot. The fanciful, purposefully young look is supposed to encourage humans to interact with it in the same way they would with a child or pet.
A camera mounted in the robot’s right eye captures faces. A facial feature tracker developed by the Neven Vision corporation isolates the faces from the captures. A buffer of up to 200 views of the face is used to create a model of the person whenever they introduce themself via speech. Additionally, Leonardo can track objects and faces visually using a collection of visual feature detectors that include color, skin tone, shape, and motion.
The group plans that Leonardo will have skin that can detect temperature, proximity, and pressure. To accomplish this, they are experimenting with force-sensing resistors and quantum tunnelling composites. The sensors are layered over with silicon like is used in makeup effects to maintain the aesthetics of the robot.
Read more about this topic: Leonardo (robot)
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