PETS:
A Personal Electronic Teller of Stories

The Skins and Sensors Group

We were the group in our intergenerational design team that worked on making the robot pieces look like animal parts. We started by sketching lots of different animals. Based on our sketches we built many different kinds of animals skins to cover our robot: a fish tail, dog paws, cow head, bear body, duck feet, and a bird tail. We had to redesign our skins many times. Sometimes the skins were too heavy for the skeleton, sometimes they just didn't look right after we made them. Sometimes the skeleton group changed something so we had to make changes too. Below are some pictures that show what we did:

This is the before (left) and this after (right) pictures. Under all of our fur are lots of LEGO bricks, motors, wires, and more.

 

We sketched out some of the animals we wanted to make. The group decided together what we should make for skins.

 

These were some of the things we tried that didn't make it. (A) This head was just too heavy and kept flopping over. (B) This bird wing looked too much like a tail, so we made it into a tail. (C) This neck never seemed to look right with the rest of the animal parts, so we decided on something else.

 

This is the skins and sensors team hard at work. Here they're working on our PETS furry toy box. In it is where we keep all of the animal parts for kids to use when they put together animals.

 

 

In Summary...

We spent a lot of time trying out different things. We found out that it was important to test every skin to see if it was too heavy for the skeleton. We learned that the skeleton group and our group had to work closely together. For the future, we know we need to make more animal skins so that kids can makes lots of different PETS.

PETS Project Page ----Skeleton Group Page ---- Software Group Page