Animatronic Polar Bear Complete

The project team was divided to partake in the creation of an animatronic chimpanzee and polar bear. Being that i am a fan of killer animals i chose to be on Team Polar Bear. Essentially, the polar bear started out as a stuffed hand puppet that you are able to stick your hand in to control the mouth of the polar bear. The purpose of animatronics is to animate the polar bear through the use of servo motors and ingenuity. This allows us to replace a human hand with some servos that can do some cool things like head tilts and move the mouth.

Today we were able to finish our animatronic polar bear. It didn't take much work with the team working on it. I estimate it took in total ~6 hours and it was really at a steady pace.

It took two sessions to complete it and after the initial session i found it hard to communicate the idea i had in my head with how the polar bear should be built. The major communication problem was because we were working in 3 dimensions and 2-dimensional sketches weren't cutting it. I had downloaded Google's SketchUp that allows you to make quick 3d models before but never had any reason to use it. So i re-downloaded it and within a couple hours I was able to knock out the following 3d model.


It helped everyone to conceptualize the idea and also to follow the same execution. The 3d model represents the "skeleton" of the polar bear. It has two servos that makes the upper jaw move up and down, and also the head to tilt side to side. The only thing left to do for the Polar Bear is to make a stand so the Polar Bear can be upright on all four legs and to test the servos and actually move our Polar Bear!