Year: 2012

Typology: Interactive 2D Robotic Arm

Team: Federico Musso, Lila PanahiKazemi, Andrea Rossi

Robotic Maze is an interactive game, based on a 2-axis custom built robotic arm developed during the Arduino & Wearables summer workshop in Lugano (CH), led by Massimo Banzi (Arduino) and Zoe Romano (OpenWear). The aim is to solve a maze by driving the tip of the robot, carrying a pen, with the two complementary robot controllers: on one side, a directional controller, based on a cube with 4 light sensors, and a speed controller, mounted on a glove and driven by a flex sensor on the fingers.

The whole project has been assembled using lasercut elements and the electronic part is driven by and Arduino Uno board. The code on the board is taking care of all the functions of the game, inculding start/reset, control and inverse kinematics to determine the correct movement of the robot head. The glove is based on an open design retrieved on OpenWear, and it has been adapted to be able to carry sensors on the fingers.

In order to successfully control the game, the user needs to negotiate between the specificity of the control interface and the behaviors and limits of the arm, creating an ecology of interaction between himself/herself and the machine.