Fonda Li's creative meme mind provided us with the inspiration to create a figure that would replicate the floss dance.
The cardboard robot does the floss dance.
We used an Arduino Uno, a breadboard, cardboard from the snack tables boxes, hot glue, and wires to create and control the robot's movement.
We originally wanted to have as many pivot points possible to best emulate the motion of a human doing the floss dance. However, we soon realized that the servo motors didn't seem strong enough to support the pivoting of the ankles and the hips. This caused us to make the last minute decision to scrap the complex hip motion and balance involved and focus on only the arm movement. Another issue we ran into was the structural stability of the overall figure. Because cardboard is relatively light, we needed a way to anchor the "feet" of the robot.
We're proud of the small innovations that we came up with along the way. This includes small details such as making the feet open boxes. Our original idea to weight down the feet was to place unopened water bottles on top of the feet, but we quickly realized that we could actually place the water bottles into the feet.
We learned that strong servo motors are really important for emulating the human body. Even a simple movement like the floss dance requires many points of rotation and movement. Weak servo motors contributes to the challenge of maintaining the balance of a cardboard robot, which doesn't have muscles like a human has.
Hip rotation! In the future, with stronger servo motors and ball bearings, we would love to implement a more accurate simulation of the dance movement.