Aryan is the name of my digital son. It is an ongoing project for developing a complete Interactive Humanoid Robot. So far, I have completed constructing its face along with its electronic boards and vision software. Up to now, Aryan is able to autonomously detect human's face, hand or facial features and track them by its active vision system. Aryan can also express its emotion in face based on the perceived visual stimulation.
The face is comprised of eight degrees of freedom. Its controllable features are eyes, eyebrows, jaw and neck. Aryan's brain runs on a standard PC with 200MHz Intel Pentium Processor under RedHat Linux. Software and the face are connected through two home-built electronic boards, motor controller and driver.
The most notable feature of Aryan is that it has been constructed from scratch from widely available and inexpensive parts and with elementary equipment , all at home. The main reason of this is technological constraints in my country, Iran. There has been no financial support for this project and all expenses are paid from my personal (student) budget.
For instance, all parts of of the face are hand-made. Gears are produced by ourselves using an old gear-cutting machine. Control board is built from discrete components of widely available chips. Driver board is also comprised of very simple parts such as resistors and transistors. Software is written in c language and the whole image processing program is coded from scratch to optimize the routines for speed.
Technical description of Aryan's face construction is available in my Final Project Report for bachelor degree in Computer Hardware Engineering. I think it is the most detailed article on developing a simple robot face that covers mechanical, electronic and software aspects altogether with theoretical and practical discussions.
I have also put here a brief technical description of Aryan in HTML format, for those who do not want to read the whole report.
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