Role: Electronics/hardware lead
Scope: Structure fabrication, electronics protoyping, motion planning software, system integration
LARA (Luskin Automated Robot Assistant) is a miniature humanoid created for UCLA’s Luskin Conference Center. LARA provides guests with information about the hotel, UCLA’s campus and the surrounding area. Her cheerful smile and wave have become an iconic part of the hotel lobby. Future versions of LARA will have facial recognition and tracking as well as being a research platform for human-robot interaction.
Challenges
- Rapid development timeline with hard deliverables.
- Designing user-interactable mechatronic system for 24-7 uptime
- Modifying old existing Darwin-OP software stack (built on Lubuntu 12.10!) to work with new module for head + reliable networking
- Writing easy-to-use motion planning library for other engineers to use.
- Recovering system after suffering static shock during development.
A big difficulty with building the LARA system was the quick development timeline and that we were given roughly a month and a half to put together the entire robot system. As the person responsible for integrating the electronics, hardware and building the keyframing system for the motions, I definitely had my work cut out for me. Near the conclusion of the project, we worked around the clock soldering, sanding 3d printed shells, driving to various shops to buy clothes for the robot (FYI it is very hard to make stretchy clothes for a metal robot!) and programming LARA.
Underneath it all
To give LARA a face capable of more expression we created a “face” using an LCD screen + raspberry pi computer enclosed in a plastic shell. This computer was wirelessly connected to the main board which did all of the motor control since the clothes on the robot and design of the helmet prevented the usual ethernet cable from being a viable option. An ipad was installed in front of the robot as a human interface through which visitors to the Luskin center could ask questions to LARA. This trio of computers were all wirelessly connected to a router stored in the platform that LARA stands on.
