Desk Pet

February - March 2023

21G.510 (Project based Japanese)

This project was a part of a Japanese class I took, where we were free to make whatever wanted for our projects as long as we could do the work and present it in Japanese. My partner and I decided to make a physical chatbot that could "speak" Japanese--she wrote the code, and I built the hardware components (mostly 3d printed in my dorm room).

To make the body of a chatbot, a few of the important aspects are having a friendly (round) appearance, a display for facial expressions, and at least some amount of movement to make it seem alive. I decided to create a nodding mechanism for this latter point, and additionally attempted to connect it to a "foot" to enable a bowing motion essential to Japanese communication.

This is a cross section of the cad, featuring a four bar linkage for the nodding motion and the orange "foot" that would lean the body forward when "bowing." Additionally, I had to make sure this design was able to be assembled and disassembled relatively easily, so I used screws instead of snap fits. I found that by setting the tolerances just right, I could create threads in the plastic and force the screw through.

In the videos below, you can see some test runs of the nodding and bowing motions. As you can tell, it was far from perfect, but it sufficed as an interesting prototype and a learning experience for designing these kinds of products. Considering the short amount of time allotted to this project, and the fact that this was for a humanities class, I was fairly happy with the result.