Happy Feet

Happy Feet takes first steps!
Happy Feet being put together!
Initial prototype
Initial prototype

Inspiration

We know how stressful it can get for students during exam season, and sometimes you just need a little distraction. Sometimes, you just need to dance your worries away. Happy Feet represents the little breaks we take in our busy lives to keep ourselves going and keep ourselves sane.

What it does

Happy Feet is a little robot that can do various fun dances, such as the stanky leg!

How we built it

We built Happy Feet using an Arduino Uno. We used 4 servos in total- 2 for each thigh and 2 for each foot. We used cardboard as a platform for the robot and a breadboard to connect all of the wires to a power source.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into include the servo having the wrong orientation, hot glue restricting the servo’s movement, and figuring out the right angles for the servo. We originally wanted to be able to start and stop the dancing of the robot with an IR remote control. However, we ran into challenges with the values of the IR sensor (one button would return multiple different values) and before we could arrive at a solution, the battery for the remote control died and we do not have a replacement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of working together and creating something with technologies we didn't have experience with. The idea of the project is truly something we believe in, and we want to take it further even after the hackathon. We are extremely excited to see where this goes!

What we learned

We learned how to set up the Arduino hardware and program the servos to move.

What's next for Happy Feet

Because Happy Feet serves as a way to distract people from their worries, we hope to add more functions related to that. We hope to include a display monitor that could display words of affirmation. If we had more time, we would add a voice chat feature to our robot. In such a feature, the person could talk to the Happy Feet robot, and the robot could communicate with the person by utilizing AI to generate appropriate and encouraging responses. We also hope to add a feature in which the robot could play music according to the conversation/mood that the person is in. For example, if the person was in a happy mood, the robot would play upbeat music.