Project Concept

To research the flora and fauna world, the expression of emotions can be identified from some plants to most animals. Many  carnivorous plants present their simple emotions like animals when they are hunting foods. This project I will use carnivorous plants as my precedent to develop a unique, funny and interactive robot expressing similar emotions in a mechanical way.

1. Examples of Carnivorous plants:

2. Possible structure using for Robot:

3. Another example of Robot form (maybe combine them):

images source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Drosera_capensis

The final robot works with audience interactively, three emotions will be presented in different periods:
Meeting —– Surprise;
Feeding — Happiness;
Say goodbye — Depression.

Identification of human emotion in my project

According to Abhay Burande, the human emotions can be classified as primary, secondary and tertiary emotions. The primary emotions are:
     1. Fear
     2. Joy
     3. Love
     4. Sadness
     5. Surprise
     6. Anger
I am planning to explore joy, sadness and surprise and combine them into my designing machine.

Joy
Joy or happiness has shades of enjoyment, satisfaction and pleasure. There is a sense of well-being, inner peace, love, safety and contentment. There is an existence of both, positive thinking and positive activities.
The first secondary emotion is “cheerfulness”. This comprises of a myriad of tertiary emotions like:
     Amusement
     Ecstasy
     Gaiety
     Euphoria
     Bliss
     Elation
     Delight
     Happiness
     Jubilation

Sadness
Sadness is necessarily related to a feeling of loss and disadvantage. If this feeling drowns the individual it may lead to a state of depression. When a person can be observed to be quiet, less energetic and withdrawn to himself it may be inferred that sadness exists. Such an individual usually has a sloping body, stuck out lips and a downcast appearance of the head.
Directly related to sadness, the following tertiary emotions can be displayed:
     Depression
     Unhappiness
     Misery
     Melancholy
     Gloom
     Despair

Surprise
Surprise means the showing up of an unexpected result. When one experiences surprise, it is accompanied by raising of the eyebrows, horizontal lines on the forehead, open mouth, stretched skin below the eyebrows and wide open eyelids. Depending on the intensity, the mouth may not open, but only the jaw may drop. A momentary raise in the eyebrows is the most common evidence of surprise.
There are related tertiary emotions like:
     Astonishment
     Amazement

During the interactive period between machine and user, my human-like machine will present three emotions in different moments:
     Meeting —– Surprise
     Face to face — Happiness;
     Say goodbye — Depression.

Design Concept

After a few experiments of sensor using, I got a clear knowledge about how the sensors work in Arduino. Review Charles Darwin’s book: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The expression of the emotion depends on the evolutionary level of animals through animals’ muscles, reflex action and habits. Lizard is one kind of lower level animals. It is not easy to identify an exact emotion to evoke a certain feeling synthetically, but focus on his writing about lizard in his book (see previous post), perhaps some interesting emotions can be transferred to an entity/organism in flash. These emotions can make a happen by lizard’s reflection and movement through its surroundings or atmosphere.

I am planning to create one of three feelings at least:
1. Hunting by using Infrared Proximity sensor (Distance),
2. Exciting by using Mini photocell (Light),
3. Nervous by using PIR motion sensor (Movement).

To create a hunting feeling, lizard in flash will be carefully moving and concentrate on its quarry. It will be fast catch its food: an insect by using its long tongue. It will use data of the IP sensor generated to control its movement in flash.

To represent an exciting feeling, I predict that using the data of photocell sensor changes the lizard’s quarry — a glow worm’s position or movement. Lizard is exciting to ran quickly and enjoy its food. Its tail may be dancing or vibrating.

To let user and lizard get a nervous feeling, PIR motion sensor is used to make the lizard stop suddenly when a man or big animal coming while it is moving and hunting. After a short time sensitive observation, lizard will continue to move if it fells no risk at all. Otherwise, it will stay a safe place or change its color to hide itself in surroundings.