The Dino Family: A Waldo Project

My waldo system was a baby dinosaur and an adult dinosaur- whatever the baby does, the adult mimics. My original 2 degrees of freedom were the motion of the arm and of the jaw, but someone in the BE lab left out a joystick and I said “hmmmm, what can I do with this?”. It took a little bit of thinking to figure out exactly how I would replicate that motion. I remembered our final project from BE 570, and was able to stack 2 servos such that the motion was honestly perfectly replicated. The tail moves much more realistically! The motion of the joystick is represented by 2 stacked servos- the servo that moves the tail left to right is attached to the base and then the servo that moves it up and down is attached on top. I bounded the motion of the servos in my code to avoid collisions between parts- specifically the jaw and the arm routinely collided. This also made the system more lifelike- jaws don’t open a full 180°. 

If I had more time on this project, I would work more on the mechanical design. Something I found difficult was understanding the limitations of the range of motions of the servos without them being physically in the built system- but it was hard to understand the limitations without seeing how they interacted with the built system. More time would’ve allowed me to do more cuts of my system, allowing me to perfect my press fits (and stop relying on glue).