ARTOPUS
Kamal Carter, Jeremy Tinucci, Ishani Tripathy
The Artopus is an octopus art robot that draws interesting patterns by vibration around flat surfaces. It “spreads ink” in the path it travels. Its legs are markers that are mounted to servos that will ungulate the body and legs up and down.
It vibrates by spinning an unbalanced motor. The motor and Arduino are run off of a battery pack attached to the bottom. The Arduino controls the fluctuation of the servo arms. 
A few parts of this bot were made and others ordered. We made the base pieces by laser cutting acrylic pieces. We made the legs from cut pieces of 1/2in pvc pipe. The plastic dome was ordered online to cover the electronics.
The idea originally was inspired from a very simple ArtBot that was made with a plastic cup with 3 pens taped to the side. An off balance motor was placed on the top to make the cup vibrate around.
We took this idea to the next step with Artopus. The pens originally just taped to the side of a plastic cup were now attached to servo motors to control its movement. The body of the bot was printed to look like an octopus and also be able to accommodate the additional electronics.
Some of the most challenging parts of this bot included assembly. Figuring out dimensions between parts that were printed or cut out and between those that were ordered was sometimes difficult. For example in the end, the wires from the motors started getting in the way of the legs. The size of the dome that we had originally planned didn’t perfectly fit into the drilled holes in the acrylic base and had to be adjusted. The weight of the bot was another point of concern. The original art bot had a plastic cup body which isn’t too heavy. However with the added arduino, 8 servo motors, PVC pipe, and acrylic the weight of Artopus started adding up. Given the size of the motor we had to work with it is very likely the bot won’t vibrate very much.
Ultimately we realized that this was a very ambitious project but we succeeded in putting together exactly what we had pictured Artopus to be. Granted it wasn’t completely functional, with more time and adjustments Artopus could be improved even more. The biggest change to make in Artopus next time would be to more carefully scale its components and find a means of being able to replace the type of markers that could be used. Reducing the weight overall is also important to making the robot more functional. Some new add-ons would including making Artopus take less random movements and more controlled ones. So define a path for the robot to draw in or to be able to control its path with an app perhaps.