Fun with Dancing LEGO EV3 Robot

My son and I have played around with the LEGO EV3 system on and off for the past few years. We've never really had a practical use, until now. My wife entered an online fan challenge for tickets to concert. The challenge is for the band Hedley. We all like the music and have seen them play a couple of times. So, we decided to give her a hand. My wife layed out her directions and ideas and my son and I put our creative energy into putting together a dancing EV3 robot. Here is our process.

We pulled out the box for the EV3, the Robot build was simple enough. We downloaded the plans (if you have an EV3 - Download the Plans from Teaching Kids Engineering).

A couple of servos for the legs. These will allow us to move the robot like a tank, one foot forward at a time. The code has the legs cycling really fast to bump the robot along.

We continued with the build of the legs...

Added in some basic arms...

We attached two different sensors to each arm. On the left, we used the colour light sensor (we'll use that to start the program). On the right, we used the touch sensor.

Finally, the fully assembled robot. We still need to hook up the servos and CPU with the cables.

Here's a look at the program we used. We modified the original program to add in things like screen images for the heart display and the "I Love Hedley" sound. We also modified the Take_Steps.ev3 to manage a few more steps (Download the base program from here).

Here we are loaded, wiring done and have synced the program to the block (CPU Block). It took us about 2 hours, to this point, a couple coffees and some tinkering with the connection to our block. Initially, we used the USB connection but found that the USB driver kept dropping. We switched to Bluetooth (if you are using Windows 10 and having USB connection problems I would highly suggest Bluetooh). After that, the connection worked like a charm.

Now we get to the fun part. My wife wanted to have the Robot dancing in the video. Since we could not really do that we decided to try using a green screen. I happened to have a piece of green cardboard. I had never done and Chroma key matting but knew that my video editing software was capable. With the green screen setup, we recorded the robot dance.

The Video

We moved over to PowerDirector for the next phase. We used the green screen as a chroma key matting allowing us to put the video of the dancing robot on top of the Hedley video.

We are pretty pleased with the end result. Especially for our first foray into chroma key use. Have a look at the video we are entering.

My son and I had a great time (except for the many adjustments from the "Director"- a.k.a Mom) putting the robot together (aside from the connection problem) and hooking up the video. We hope the entry does well and hope you enjoy.