Day 1 – Project 1 – Thursday

After presenting our kickass knocking robot to the class, we were then given our first assessed project for the semester. We have been tasked with creating a drawing robot to create art based on interactions with an environment using different sensors and such. To be honest the idea seemed quite overwhelming at first and took me a little while to come up with a few base ideas and do some small sketches of them before taking the opportunity to break off from the previous group to get to know some new people and see how working with them would work out. I grouped up with 4 others, Edrian, Lucy, Supa and Lee and we kicked things off quite quickly and began brainstorming some quick ideas for designing our robot. I felt that we meshed really well together and quite quickly we came up with a number of ideas but only two were really considered and developed. Either a robot with an arm that moved in a central arc or a robot that creates its art using a set of lights that are captured using a DSLR camera on a slow shutter speed. Deciding on the idea of the central arm we started developing the idea deciding on what materials we would use for creating the art, choosing between white or black paper and using flouro gel pens or highlighters to create a drawing that would stand out in the dark. This brought about the idea of using a U.V light as a way of illuminating the lines drawn by the pens. At this stage we started to build our robot, starting first with our moving arm then moving on to the wheels and main body before the day came to a close. Below are some of the pictures from the build process.