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Here's the chicken wire frame of the
kid before being coated with burlap. The chicken wire was wrapped around a
wooden frame for the legs, torso, arms and head. One motor rotated the
waist. Two more motors moved the left arm and elbow and another motor
rotated the eyes horizontally (seen in later photos). I hand shaped the
chicken wire into the different body parts. The main tools used were a
good pair of leather gloves, cutters and pliers. As the project progressed
I felt like I didn't want to coat the figure with burlap since the see
through nature of the wire looked interesting. After some disagreement
with the teacher I quit going to class entirely . |
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Here's a side view of the kid. It
stands about 5 feet tall and is surprisingly light weight. The kid was
only designed to stand upright making it difficult to load into my car. I needed to take this
thing from and to art class every week. Fortunately, there was a simple solution for the transportation problem- the kid's head,
waist and legs could disconnect from each other. |
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Here's a picture showing the body
parts disassembled. No screws were needed. Gravity and tight fitting joints
held the parts together when assembled. It's hard to see but the head is
in front laying down on the floor. |
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Here's the kid fully assembled.
It's standing to the right of all the computer equipment. I wish I had
better pictures but at the time I had no digital camera. These pictures
were taken using a camcorder and a PC digital video capture card. Not the
greatest pictures but good enough. As you can see, I decided to partially
coat the kid with burlap. There was a city arts festival coming up and I
wanted to enter it as a display in one of several "booths"
scattered throughout the festival. This festival ended up being my main
incentive for completing the project. |
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Here's a close-up of the torso.
The top is a multi segment bar graph display. The bar graphs would light
up according to the speech output. Did I mention that this thing could
talk? It could play back 10 seconds worth of recorded speech. Down at the
bottom are the electronics for controlling the motors and speech chip. |
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Here's the kid's head and torso.
You can see the two big eyes along with the huge ears. I called this thing
Robokid. I took a dozen photos and submitted them along with a one page
description to the art festival committee. Forgive the language, but
after all of this work the damn bastards at the committee rejected my
work. I don't think they even read the one page description- they probably
didn't even realized that this thing moved! They were probably thinking
this was the biggest piece of still sculpture crap they'd ever seen. My
point was to make this look like it was built out of scrap - something a
kid would build. I wasn't submitting this to the Smithsonian. This was a
city arts festival with ordinary people strolling the streets with their
kids, eating food and watching events. I know kids would have
been fascinated by Robokid. I was so
disappointed that I disassembled Robokid, kept the electronics and then
threw everything else into the dumpster. |