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Edit: Kickstarter campaign failed in 2015.
Starting in 2025 you can build an interactive Alan by joining my Robotics Courseware (links coming soon). You can follow along with detailed video instructions starting with 3d printing parts. Off the shelf hardware components links are included with the BOM. Don't miss out! Be sure to get a head in robotics. Build at you own pace. Coming soon.
Introducing Alan, the android head robot platform kit, soon to be released on Kickstarter.
First a quick introduction. For those that may not know me. I've been a make up effects artist in the film industry for the past 23 years. Robots have always fascinated me since I was a kid growing up in Ohio and watching Lost in Space episodes. That interest never left me and when starting work in the film industry, I taught myself animatronics. That is I would be called upon to make something move via radio controlled, a puppet, or a toaster or ? As CGI took over the animatronics part of my industry, I focused my free time on using that knowledge for robotics. When I saw prosumer 3D printers come on the market 8 years ago, I knew I could get some of my ideas to the table with out the need for a garage full of CNC machines.
Alan is a culmination of of both technologies, animatronics and 3D printing. When this idea started 3 years ago, I had just found EZ Robots and knew that I could build an interestingly designed kit for everyone so they could experiment with robotics. A platform that personifies how we will interact with robots and androids in the near future, by looking them in the face.
My first challenge was to make sure I leaped over the "uncanny valley". To do so, I took the human dimensions and changed them a bit, eyes wider apart, downplayed high details and added features that were without a doubt not human and certainly robotic in form.
The second challenge was keeping the cost down for consumers. A head like this in the film industry, filled with lots of motions like brow, smile, etc would costs $10's of thousands of dollars. So I built Alan with a modular design in mind. Meaning that the store front will carry modules that will allow you to customize and upgrade the same robot without having to buy a whole new head. As an example the front subskull can be replaced with a module with brow movement, allowing you to keep the entire head and eye mechanism. Other silicone skins will become available different colors and genders, styles, etc. The low cost introductory head will include about 22 parts, easy to assemble, with the consumer supplying servos, power supplies EZB, etc. on their own. My website will include links to all the accessories needed, plus mods like LED eyes, built in audio systems and so on. All the parts will be molded and manufactured in Los Angeles. There will be no pressure injected molding of parts this time around. These are cold cast high impact plastic parts and platinum silicone skins. Alans future may include a full body, if the Kickstarter is successful. And you can certainly use this as a replacement head for InMoov . I will look at altering the open source STL files to be able to accept my heads.
I always knew that the EZB would be Alan's brains. And I will promote it as such. As we all know, DJ's commitment and advancement to the EZB is leading us into the future of robotics.There really is no other choice in my mind. But that's in part because I'm no programmer
D. Cochran's EZ-AI is a boon to Alans development. I look forward to where David takes it. And although I have it installed I have yet to implement it with Alan for a few more weeks. All of these working together will be highlighted on the Kickstater video.
I have several more weeks to finish the paint job and run a new hero silicone skin. Then there is the very important Kickstarter video. So we are at least 4 weeks out. But I will post here the links to both the Kickstarter and Alans website when they go live and as Alan progresses.
I look forward to your ideas for programming and how you would mod him. I'd also like to hear how you would like to see him develop. Thanks for your time and enjoy the development pictures and video.
All the best,
Will
Programming
Camera, Speech recognition, speech synthesis, pad touch,
Parts & Materials
Dynamixels, Arduino, USB camera, EZB 4, micro servos and regular servos
Other robots from Synthiam community
Tezsmith's My Robot Story
Tevans's Help With My R2
Between builds have videos of the robots talking to each other every time you leave the room. Sometime videos for fun get views!
Congrats on passing 100k views btw
That’s a lot of views.
Beautiful work. I need to spend a lot more time to study all this. I do love it already.
I've been thinking of switching the skin out on mine from white to transparent PLA or a 2-color combo of transparent with an embedded hexagon pattern in white or black. I never really though about using a flexible skin. Very cool indeed.
I had to go over it all again and your words. Once again, beautiful work. I can see myself buying one.
You brought up the uncanny valley...such a big topic there. It needs its own discussion area really. Its a big reason why I have gone with machine-looking bots with elements of animals and animation with screens...to try to get away from looking too human. Its another reason I try to do minimalist but have constant subtle movement. I like to incorporate Visemes now into the mouth movement and speaking. The valley is still lurking around every corner. When you get into the conversation side, timing is a constant issue too, something as small as a 1 second pause versus a 2 second pause in some situation...valley. For me, initiative is a big deal, having the bot thinking constantly in all the in between moments (with emotion and motivation and speech or movement) instead of just waiting for a human to say something. Every time I get a chance to work on that another year goes by. One easier way to is to use some old MIBE architecture concepts (try wiki page for an overview). I also think a small neural net or fuzzy logic based system is another way to go, and has an advantage of avoiding lots of brittle spaghetti coding. I have prototyped these last 2 (NNs and Fuzzy) for other robot use cases but have not tried it for facial expression and conversation aspects. I will probably stick with a MIBE like concept there.
you should do a complete series of build videos on youtube that would boost your subscriber numbers
Alan is getting wrapped into a master class, files/ and or kits and how-to classes. I have a movie to work on in the fall so not sure when that will be completed.
Hey Will, Just a thought on how to differentiate your youtube channel is to to understand your audience. Mostly people that have the passion and not the talent developed. You could do polls and ask people what they want to see next. It would be highly interactive. You could say; on this last robot people asked how I achieved this particular function or surface quality on a part. Now you have people dictating the content to an extent, learning (those are the videos you follow!). I seldom pick up a technique after seeing it for the first time so I subscibe to come back. There you subscriptions. Subscriptions can also come from people that have to come back to understand more complex content. You content is complex so perhaps this can work.
Perry