Can Dinsky
In the fall of my senior year, I took Mechatronics (530.421), a project-based robotics course taught by Dr. Allison Okamura. Our final project was to create an "artbot"--an autonomous mobile robot which created some "art" on a canvas on the floor.
My teammate Nick Marchuk (a senior mechanical engineer) and I created a robot which walks around the canvas on six legs, spraying paint from two small cans located in its neck. We named it Can Dinsky.
The artbots met with mixed reviews in the media:
- "Can Dinsky...did indeed seem to have a mind of its own." -The Baltimore Sun
- "...quite possibly the cutest thing to ever come out of an engineering class." -Johns Hopkins Magazine
- "...soulless machines..." -Johns Hopkins Gazette
- "...entertaining..." -City Paper
Here are some more pictures:
...and here's a video of Can Dinsky in action:
Tiny the Dancing Robot
For the first project in the class, we had to create a "lightbot"--a stationary robot that did something interesting with light. I and two other ECE students created Tiny Dancer:
Here are some videos of Tiny in action: