Anima

Anima is a small walking robot created with a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, laser cut acrylic, servo motors, glass, and love. He moves with different gaits, and can currently sit and walk. Sydney Ayers, an undergraduate studying Art and Game Design, designed and developed Anima with the support of Microgrant #2018-03 from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier.

Ayers’ future plans include adding PIR sensors to sense movement, and possibly a camera with basic computer vision to detect faces. Ayers writes: “Our current technologies like AI, robotics, and neural nets all mirror and are based off of nature. What we create through technology is not the opposite of nature, but a simplified structural interpretation of it.”