Building a Robotic Head
One of the most difficult parts of designing a robot head was figuring out how to build the structure to support all the features and motors. The frame for Joyce is built out of various sized joyce brackets that are typically used to build decks for people’s backyards. The base is a square foot of Burch wood and a small metal pipe acts as a neck to support the head structure.
Joyce is operated through the use of six individual hi-tech servos. These motors are in turn controlled by a SSC-II serial servo controller.
The SSC-II needs to have power attached to it through a 9v battery to power the board, and an adapted Atari power supply for the Servos.
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The Facial Features
It is important to align the servos on the head structure so that the 180degrees of motion can translate into the correct facial motion.
The motors control the following facial features: The mouth, the eyes left/right, the eyes up/down, a blinking eyelid, left eye brow, and right eye brow.
Joyce is based on work by many previous robot heads. Most importantly, the work done at the ETC on Doc Beardsley was particularly helpful in figuring out the design and positioning of elements on the head.
