The Parrotronix team has surpassed a month of non-stop acceleration since our two Qualification Review Board events earlier in the semester. But just because things are going well doesn’t mean we aren’t starting to get nervous around here! While we’ve been busy machining and 3D printing, we’ve also been aware of a looming deadline: IPPD’s Prototype Inspection Day is next week!

We’ll be putting on a good show, with both of our featherless friends on display for expert faculty from all around UF to observe! While we won’t have all of our scenic elements ready in time, we see this as a positive: We want to hear from the invited guests all they have to say about our mechanical design and our manufacturing as it stands. Unfortunately, images of our in-production birds aren’t ready at the time of this blog post, but we’re very excited to share our birds first public debut in the coming days!

Don’t worry, we didn’t work during all of UF’s official spring break! But that doesn’t mean Parrotronix was slacking off either. A huge part of our progress over the last two weeks has been preparing as many components for manufacturing ahead of our team’s full return to campus after the break. This includes our motors, mounting blocks, fasteners, and the largest subsystem of the animated figures themselves: Their shells!

Now, parrots don’t usually have shells, but they also aren’t usually filled with wiring, linkages, and servo motors! In order to create a cohesive look for each of our figures, we took time over break to do some Spring Cleaning of our 3D models, including digitally sculpting our birds. Our team has been working in Blender, an extremely powerful and free 3D mesh software that is widely used in the entertainment industry. Using the sculpting and mesh editing tools, we can artistically shape our birds while ensuring all of the critical mechanical systems are contained properly. This is also the step where we add cuts to allow for the large range of motion in the figure, as well as mechanical connections to the skeleton of each figure. Once these parts are printed, our scenic team will follow up by preparing a fabric pattern for each section, with help from some of Blender’s built in texturing tools.

Our team is still hard at work refining and manufacturing our final product this week. If you have been following along our blog posts, you’ve seen that our team has been inspired and empowered to push through our tasks as efficiently as possible. Because of this, we’ve had so many advancements that we won’t be able to detail them all in just one blog post!

To start, our computer team has been working on refining their algorithms and improving our automatic speech and phoneme detection to allow for easy updates after this project exits development. The mechanical team has been focusing on our sheet metal fabrication, as we’ll need access to some of the advanced machinery available at the Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence’s Open Prototyping Lab (or, the HWLEE OPL… but that isn’t much easier to say, is it?), including an OMAX Abrasive Waterjet. Our electrical team has also been coordinating the wiring harnesses for each of the birds and their internal components, while also taking the time to ensure all of our components are weatherproof and certified to the highest standards for reliability, especially in extreme heat and humidity. And with all of that being said, we can’t wait to share even more progress in two weeks after a restorative Spring “break”!

This week, our team hit another major milestone: We’ve begun final manufacturing for our project deliverables! In other words, we’re well on our way to meeting our feathered friends!

We also just finished up consulting with a panel of IPPD faculty during our second Qualification Review Board. Like we anticipated last week, we presented the significant increase in productivity and overall progress that our team has made since the previous event, and the panel also provided valuable feedback on how we can maintain an sustain this level of production. As the semester heats up and members start dealing with other exams and college to-dos, we’re still pushing ahead to deliver a great product. With all of the positive results from the last week, we’re finding some much needed optimism here at Parrotronix!

A huge amount of engineering progress has been made in the last week, breaking a record for our entire team in action-items solved. The mechanical team completed their integrated model and made significant progress on CAD drawings for final manufacturing. Their work was combined with the computer team’s most recent updates, and we also started work on our weather resistance testing. Phew!

As our team gears up for our second Qualification Review Board next week, we’re focusing on testing. That means waterproofing, durability testing, and a huge range of qualitative tests as well. To start, we’ve been testing the durability of many materials in our project to ensure they are meeting design specifications. For instance, the ABS and ASA materials used for our 3D printed parts, the urethane resin used to coat them, and the faux fur fabric that will be sewn over top of the entire assembly. Each of these materials plays an important role. Both the 3D printed materials and their resin coatings passed our tests with flying colors.

Speaking of flying colors… while our birds might not fly, they need to look fly! Before and after treating our fabrics with a hydrophobic coating from 3M, we evaluated the appearance, UV resistance, and waterproofing qualities of each sample. This was one of our most surprising test results; the coated fabric materials were significantly more waterproof than expected, which is great news for ensuring a long lifetime for these animated figures. We are excited to see such rapid testing and progress and can’t wait to showcase our strides in staying on-track with our next Qualification Review Board.

Who doesn’t love arts and crafts? This week’s blog post is a long-overdue update from our scenic team! We’ve recently received the materials and tools required to give our parrots a perch to call home. And not just any home, a sculpted masterpiece at that!

Well, we can’t argue that any of us are master sculptors, but some members of our team have learned from some of the best in the industry when it comes to scenic finishes and delicate details. Starting from the bottom, our bird perch will be resting on a rolling base, complete with a detailed fiberglass rock. Crucially, the entire structure has been designed to fit through the existing openings of the historic cage at Pinecrest Gardens. Peeking out of the rock are two rigid PVC pipes, but they will soon be covered in a detailed epoxy putty sculpt to emulate the trees and man-made perches these birds used to actually sit on when our venue was known as Parrot Jungle.

This process includes some quite messy components, from putty to powder, and silicone too! The result is a realistic tree branch that serves as the main structure for our animated figures. Not only is the final result incredibly lifelike, but it’s also being manufactured using the exact same method and materials as in major theme parks around the world. It’s going to look great!

A major milestone has been reached! The computer team has made noteworthy progress in enhancing our speech recognition and animation system, and have combined their work with the mechanical and electrical team using real production hardware! Here’s a quick rundown on what they’ve been up to.

Using advanced signal processing, our show controller automatically detects the timestamps of consonants in the spoken word audio for each parrot. implementation of the control system. This involves integrating physical servo motors, a central processor, and various mechanical systems crucial for the functionality of the final product.

To validate the system, the team ran the speech processing algorithm on the actual show control hardware. This allows us to test audio playback, motion controls, and motor synchronization outside of just simulations. This testing led to a great value-add as well: Our computer team also introduced randomized animation sequences to the show software, which provides a unique experience for every show, ensuring that our feathered friends are as lifelike as their inspiration. Of course, we will continue to refine both the speech recognition and animation systems as our final product takes shape, and we can’t wait to share more of our manufacturing journey ahead!

This week, our team gathered in the Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence to meet with a panel of UF faculty for an evaluation of our project. The Qualification Review Board, as its called, serves as a check-in to ensure our team is on track to meet our goals and deliver the best product we can. Our team’s review board consisted of three experienced mechanical engineering faculty members who gave us both praise and constructive criticism.

Since the Spring semester began, our team has been working hard to begin final manufacturing. A few small delays throughout the previous month have added up to a larger issue, but it’s nothing that we can’t solve without some careful planning and hard work. Every big project is bound to hit a speedbump, and we’re ready to adapt to the challenge. We’re working diligently with our partners at the HWLEE Open Prototyping Lab, our IPPD Lab, and Pinecrest Gardens to resolve issues before they occur. For instance, while motor testing is underway, we are preparing an alternate vendor and manufacturer to take over in case our testing uncovers issues with the parts we have. We’re also moving forward with parts of our project that aren’t impacted by any delays, such as scenic finishes. This will allow us to get ahead and save time in the future.

This week, Parrotronix kept busy with mechanical and scenic design, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have some fun! Members of the mechanical and electrical teams visited Home Depot to familiarize ourselves with how some of the standard materials will appear in relation to each other. It’s one thing to see schedule 40 pipe in a 3D model, but it’s totally different when comparing proportions in the real world.

We worked together on the base and perch structure that will eventually support our animatronics, which will appear similar to cypress knees. We also took some time to investigate the rockwork finishes available, and compared them with both the natural and artificial geology present at Pinecrest Gardens.

We also spoke with some industry experts who work with leading animated figure manufacturers. We gained valuable insights into how the manufacturing process works, as well as some of the innovative techniques some of the most advanced animated robotics employ to achieve realistic, reliable motion. Although we aren’t producing animatronics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, we’re still striving to implement this important advice in our control algorithms and mechanical interfaces. With all of this work, we’re prepared just in time for our first meeting with a Qualitative Review Board from IPPD for some valuable engineering feedback.

As we approach manufacturing, our team is still hard at work finishing our mechanical and scenic design work to prepare for sourcing. Although most of our team is proficient in SolidWorks, sometimes a good, old-fashioned cardboard mockup is the best way to effectively communicate our ideas.

The mechanical team is deep in final calculations to verify our designs for production. While there aren’t too many details ready to share, we’re excited to get working in UF’s manufacturing lab. On the other side of the room, the computer team has set up our Nvidia Jetson Nano and is running through the initial programming prototype that was created last month. Now that we’re out of simulation and on real hardware, debugging and testing is much faster! The scenic team is making arrangements with our vendors to get sample swatches and materials sent to the IPPD labs. A busy week indeed!