News
About
Projects
Contact
Material
Calendar
Resources

Embodied speech and facial expression avatar

Advisors: Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, Steve Ortiz

Project Description:

The objective of this project is to develop a robotic face puppet capable of articulating facial expressions and visual speech. For this purpose, you will reverse engineer a commercially available toy (e.g., Furby, Yano bears), develop interface circuits for the motors, and a graphical user interface that allows you to control the puppet, and articulate various facial expressions (e.g., smiles, frowns, lip motion, etc)

Educational Objectives:

  1. Robotics systems, reverse engineering, sensor/actuator interfacing
  2. Human computer interaction: multimodal interfaces
  3. System integration: low-level hardware control, graphical user interface

Deliverables:

  1. Computer-controlled robotic head
  2. Graphical user interface with parameterized control of facial expressions
  3. Project documentation and live demonstration, as described in the course syllabus