GoonQuad, an Emotive Quadruped

Hi everyone

This week my students from Computing in the Creative Arts had a public exhibit of their term projects. This project is close to my heart as I worked closely with this particular group of students who had very little technical background (one from film, one from drama, and one from comp.sci, all 2nd year students) but were deeply passionate about creating an interactive robot capable of expressing emotions and interacting with people. (The students involved were Lauren Abramsky, Kristy Titanic and Jesse Shaw, I will link to their websites at a later time)

Watch it working:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqIDKVA1GFA (my students edited video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB8393kkLGA (record/playback)

In this version, the quadruped has 4 prerecorded states ("angry","party","confused","breathe"), triggered by the touch of a person in areas specified by the eyebrows and a tattoo that read "Mom", painted with bare conductive and used as capacitive sensors.