Orangejoe
I'm just, JUST starting to look at robotics (have a few parts at home, have a few things on order).
So I have started looking at the current state of the art in hobby robots to see what can be reasonably achieved.
I compared the motion of Open Sourced (often EZ-Robot controlled) InMoov which takes dozens or hundreds of man-hours to build with the motion of "Female Figure" (which is a NSFW museum piece of an 'exotic dancer', viewer discretion when googling).
The former moves like a hobby robot and will set you back thousands of dollars, the latter is an "animatronics" piece that has eerily human-like arm/hand/finger movements design to play with the uncanny valley.
Usual animatronics perform a limited set of motions (think Disney's "It's a Small World" ride) over and over, but the arms on this piece seem to have a full range of motion for shoulders, arms, hands and fingers.
I can't imagine these animatronic arms being as complex or costly as an InMoov shoulder/arm/hand build. The build certainly doesn't look as complex from the close up shots on youtube.
From the perspective of making movements life-like, this does not seem to have an equal.
Is anyone in the hobby robot community using the same construction approach this animatronic has? Can anyone explain that animatronic build?
@Doombot from your reply I gather they are not doing anything special on that build versus "common" animatronics to achieve that lifelike motion, that is all I needed to hear. I'll start looking at schematics over the weekend.
My train of thought:
A 1:3 scale biped or Jonnie 5 type bot would look great with those fluid motions (which I know some here associate with "toy" Japanese robots).
I think some lifelike movement could make some robots "better" at that scale versus giving them the ability to have a working hand/gripper. It's not like most robots of similar size are carrying six packs of beer back to the user.
Then again, I haven't built or designed any yet. I'll keep reading.
@Richard, don't say I didn't warn you.
@orangejoe, yes spectral motion was the shop responsible. Animatronics engineer Mark Setrakian who brought us giant battling robots designed and built the animatronics for this display. My ex girlfriend works in the shop and said, like EZB, it had a camera and did facial tracking. She made the costume and said the creepy head followed her around the room as she worked.
hmmmm, I'm going to have 3 shots and clean my weapon. That was disturbing. Yeah, I, well, how . . . . . . . .
Lol, right?