It is nothing new to see our scholars and members of our community attending or organizing numerous workshops, seminars, conferences and showing outstanding performance. We have got used to that. However, have you ever imagined that the knowledge, skills and experience of our scholars would reach another dimension by creating a project that will appear in the music video? Yeah, you have read it well. It is time to meet Robby Megabyte, a humanoid robot that sings and moves independently and that appeared in the latest musical album “FakeNews” launched by Dubioza Kolektiv, according to Bosnia and Herzegovina Futures Foundation.
This is what our scholars, Edin Omerović, Mugdim Đuliman, and Aldina Bundavica along with their colleagues from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering Sarajevo, Amina Tihak, Almir Bešić, Adnan Arnautović, Abdulah Jamak and Nermin Čović have been working on for a couple of months.
Edin, who has been working on the robot platform’s design, told us the whole story about the robot:
“This journey started in May of 2018. when one of Dubioza Kolektiv’s members reached out to Embedded Systems Club of Faculty of Electrical Engineering Sarajevo with an unusual request. He requested from us to create a robot that will sing and be the main actor in a music video – for their new upcoming album #FakeNews. Of course, all of us were excited and honored because of the offer and we started preparing for its construction, without even realizing how much time and effort it will be necessary to invest into the project. But, we have been motivated.
We decided to go with the open-source design based on Gael Langevin’s InMoov project. InMoov is a life-sized humanoid robot, constructed almost fully from 3D printed parts and controlled by Arduino microcontroller. Considering that the robot is almost 40 kg, just the process 3D-printing took multiple months. Six people worked on the assembly and construction of the robot and another two on programming.
I have to mention that we fully developed and constructed a platform on which the robot is standing. The platform is powered by the differential drive and remote-controlled by an operator. The robot is able to perceive sound, see, speak and move independently. It’s equipped with a 3D camera that allows it to see and analyze the 3-dimensional space and environment.
Robby Megabyte is one of the biggest projects that I’ve worked on. It’s been full of hard work, sacrifice, ups and downs but in the end, it was a great experience and honor to be part of such a fantastic team that worked on this project”.
