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Check out this tight ass hexapod robot from MicroMagic systems! Very cute.

The hexapod was my fourth generation robot, and took around 2 weeks to build, the hexapod locomotion engine has been developed on and off over a couple of years. The face recognition software was based on OpenCV libraries, integration of face recognition into the i.C. hexapod face tracking took around 1 week, but with several weeks of fine tuning and enhancements.

A bit of technical background:

i.C. has an on board processor I have developed called the p.Brain, this takes care of all body leg and body locomotion. The p.Brain runs on a PIC ds33F processor.

There is an off board Windows XP Mini-ITX based PC with a Pentium M 1.73Ghz processor which takes care of the face recognition and tracking. This PC is connected to the p.Brain via a serial link. Only simple commands such as X,Y and Z rotation of the head and body are sent to the p.Brain from the PC. This means that if the PC crashes (which they so often do!) The p.Brain will put i.C to sleep without damaging any of the servos.

There are 21 servos on i.C. hexapod. 3 degrees of freedom for each leg, 2 for head pan and tilt, and one which acts as a blink shutter for the main lens. i.C. blinks when a picture has been taken, pictures are stored locally with the time data and location they were taken, and also uploaded to a server for his website (still under development).

via HackedGadgets