MORAV giant robot live action science fiction

[Fon]

Hello

If you or someone you know enjoys giant robot live action science fiction shot with real robots. Please come by and check us out. We just launched this new website and we're trying to get some traffic and people to join the discussion forum. We built our own telemetry suit to operate the upper body of the robots and a computer will do the walk cycles. We have video there you can see.

www.morav.net



Here is the link to 3 MORAV robot videos.

http://morav.net/downloads.html


Thanks

Fon

[Admin]

it appears you have like 25 servos on this thing . . .
http://morav.net/images/behindthescenes/IMG_0119.jpg

care to share info on your servo controller? 

im also curious about that hand . . . was that custom made?

how many man hours would you say took to make it?

im gonna make my own, soon . . . must do research first

[Fon]

You would be correct.  We're testing with a basic stamp kit and a Parallax Propeller.  We have not decided yet. 

We'd love to get more opinions on controllers too

The movement in the upper body is controlled by aour telemetry suit so we'll only use the controller for walk cycles.

We custom built most of it using some parts from Lynxmotion.  It took us probabley 500 hours including the T-suit.

We're still doing reasearch and will be forever.  There is always room to improve on the design.

[annoyin_kid]

so wait wots the thing with all the servos do and how do you get enough juice to run 25 of them?

[Fon]

The servos are assembled into the skeliton of our MORAV generation 1 robot.  The entire thing is tethered to a to a laptop, telemetry suit and a power supply.

[annoyin_kid]

ok mate wots a morav and wots a telemetry suit?

[Fon]

You can see the MORAVs and the telemetry suit at our website: www.morav.net

We have video of the telemetry suit in action on our downloads page.  It's a backpack you strap your arms a onto to control the robot's movement.  When you move the robot moves.

[annoyin_kid]

i didn't watch the video cuz im on dialup but from the description i can say "dam thats awesome". im going to do that one day. how much weight can it lift? and how many fingers does it have?

[Fon]

It can only lift a couple onces.  It's really just fro show.  That's the advantage of fiction shows, it's just got to look like it works.  The design is unique, it has 2 thumbs and 2 forfingers.

[Admin]

just out of curiosity, why did you choose to make a functional robot instead of just do claymation-like techniques?

[Fon]

Animation takes too long for what we're trying to do.  If we use real working robots, we can shoot them with real time movement much like an actor or actress.  When I worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas we had twenty animation stages shooting and we were lucky to get one minute a week in final footage.  There are twenty frames in every second of film.  It's hard to do on the fly and still manage the quality we're looking for in our series. 

We also like that the movement will look like robotic movement because it's a real robot.  No faking it.  We will however shoot in high speed to acheive a larger scale feel from the miniatures.