Marionette: Technology, Education & Art

"Pete the Puppet"

This robotic marionette represents three generations of technologic development, involving four teams of students. Two teams were from the computer science department, in our Microprocessor Design course. The other team responsible for the mechanical frame structure was from the engineering technology department. And the last team was responsible for finishing of prototype, appearance, and addition of music matched motions.

(CPSC 462) Starting from the fall semester of 2004, the final prototype was completed in summer 2005. After working with the soldier puppet so long many of the students begin referring to it affectionately as "Pete the Puppet".

The first generation prototype is a wooden stage mounted with motors to control up-down motion of the puppet. The stepper pulled a bicycle chain to move the puppet to move across the stage.

The servos and the stepper motor were controlled using controller ICs connected to a microprocessor evaluation board, Atmel EB63. The prototype worked yet the wooden frame became severely deformed after a while.

In the second generation an aluminum stage-frame was rebuilt by a team of students from the Engineering Technology Department (ENTC) as their senior design project.

The centerpiece for control of the puppet position on the stage is a combination cart pulled by a rubber belt on a rotating disc. Both belt and disc were powered by stepper motors. As a result, the puppet can move backward, forward, along angles and change directions. Several servos were used to support arm-leg motions of the puppet.

Computer science students were responsible the entire control system, including wiring, power, motor interface circuits, board interfaces, communications, and entertainment software. PC, microcontroller board, and an Xilinx Spartan III FPGA are integrated together for the students to understand their capabilities. The FPGA contains some puppet motion routines to perform repeated movements. It can also perform motions based on the command sequences sent from the microcontroller.

For instance, a sign language glove interfaced through the microcontroller board can use the glove to control the motions of the puppet.

In the latest generation of the project, two students added a high level entertainment user interface to detect beats of a song and use the detect beats to control the puppet motions. A set of LED light boxes are also synchronized to the music beats to produce rich sound, motion and light effects. The prototype was demonstrated in 2005 Microsoft Faculty Summit as a part of its DemoFest. A Microsoft research group added the SOAP networking capabilities to the microcontroller to show case the feasibility of light weight communications.