iC Hexapod is the coolest robot I’ve ever seen. Builder Matt Denton of Micromagic Systems designed and machined the parts, motherboard, controller, and algorithms required to bring elegant animate life to this gorgeous piece of creative engineering, as Denton calls it. Each leg sports three servos giving it 18 degrees of freedom. The head has an additional three motors including one for a shutter, giving the robot a total of 21 degrees of freedom. The Inverse Kinematic algorithms Denton applies gracefully control all the motors in a symphony of fluid motion as the robot looks back at people who look at him.
iC Hexapod has a head with a CCD camera that sends streaming video to an off-board computer that applies facial recognition algorithms to identify the faces of his onlookers using OpenCV, an Open Source computer vision library. The disembodied computer then sends head movement commands back to iC Hexapod. The result is an emotion evoking robot with smooth and lifelike movement that brings smiles to some kids and adults while creeping out others.
To close the deal, iC Hexapod occasionally takes photos of the people he meets and posts them onto his own blog.
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Check out a video of iC Hexapod at Monster Mash:
