Angry Politics

Created by Kai Hernandez, Edward Holthaus, and Kevin Wainczak

Given this election year’s colorful presidential candidates, we decided to create something to show the parallels between the two top candidates.  Presenting Angry Politics, featuring HillaryBot and TrumpBot.  These two figures demonstrate their models’ temperaments when given questions on subjects they do not agree on, providing angry (and humorous) responses when presented with subjects they do not like.

Implementation

Our little politicians are based on the Pololu 3Pi platform, making use of it’s built in line following sensor to keep the robot in the test stage.  We attached an infrared rangefinder to detect the “questions” and colored LED’s to add additional decorations to the robot.

We laser cut cardboard to create a shell for the 3pi to support the effigies of Clinton and Trump and to create the question pieces.  This was a quick and simple method to create the pieces we wanted.  After cutting them out and gluing the printed pictures for the characters on, they were simply attached to the top of the 3pi.  For a future iteration, we would have used Acrylic instead.  We also created a “stage” out of a cardboard sheet and a printed background of the stage from the first debate to showcase the robots.

Credits:

Kai:  design of laser cut shells, stage, and question pieces, video narration and editing

Kevin: robot code, video script and filming

Teddy:  robot anger states, assembly of robots, video script and filming, documentation compilation

CAD files for robot shells here

Robot code here