I worked as an undergraduate researcher under MIT’s UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) program and my role was sensor and IO system development.

 

I worked with Cynthia Breazeal (project lead), Jeff Lieberman (design lead), Heather Knight (mechanical design UROP), and Dan McAnulty (interactive soundtrack development UROP).

Panoramic view of the installation before the front cover and metallic grass-bed were installed.

above:  Working at our make-shift lab in the museum

 

right:  My arrival at the museum with the contents of my lab bench packed in my suitcase.

 

The finished installation

left:  Installing a thermopile sensor array on one of the flowers.

 

above:  Close-up of the thermopile sensors.

 

I developed a directional heat sensor based on an off-the-shelf thermopile which we used on eight of the robots.  The sensor consisted of four individual thermopiles in groups of two with each group aimed at slightly different angles.  The robots were programmed to rotate in the direction (to the right or to the left) which sensed the greatest heat, and the result was that the robots would follow a person around by rotating themselves to face the person.  

 

I also integrated a Sharp IR rangefinder into several of the robots for proximity sensing, adapted an existing IO board from another project for sending sensor data to the main computer, and wrote the microcontroller code which read data from all the sensors and sent the data to the main computer via RS232.