Face Tracking Animatronic Eye Mechanism

These are my two replicas of the XBOT 4000, from the Netflix show "Love Death + Robots". The face was sculpted in Monster Clay and cast in two versions from a brush on silicone mold.

The static version has a simple lidar and and will trigger lights + sound samples when someone passes by the robot.

The face tracking animatronic version is running custom firmware on an OpenCM 9.04 controller. This controls 10 servos in total. 2 for the camera gimbal and 8 for the eyes and eyelids.

A Nvidia Jetson runs a slightly modified MTCNN facetracker (link in the video). This communicates witht the Robotis OpenCM over USB via a custom protocol.

The eye mechanism was designed from scratch in Fusion 360, but was heavily inspired by this design: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Com...

Contents of this video --

00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Assembling the Jetson re_computer
02:20 - Testing the MTCNN face detector
04:05 - Animatronics
04:48 - XBOT 4000 in Monster Clay
04:58 - Brush on mold
05:55 - Mother mold
06:00 - Rotocasting
06:26 - Demolding
06:43 - Static display version + voice
07:10 - Presentation
11:50 - Sample and light triggering
11:55 - Face tracker internal assembly
15:17 - OpenCM firmware
17:53 - Protocol testing
19:04 - Jetson code
20:15 - Face tracking test
22:45 - Lessons learned
24:06 - DALL·E variations