People who take movies, TV, and video games seriously often talk about how some fictional worlds feel “lived in” and others feel sterile. The Star Wars franchise has examples of both. The sequels were derided for falling into the latter category, but the original trilogy fell into the former category. That was thanks to the use of practical effects, which even extended to the movement of the droids. If you want to make your own robots exhibit lifelike movement, Donald Bell’s Instructables tutorial will introduce you to Bottango.
The problem with typical robot movement is that it is too precise. If a robot needs to move from one point to another, it will usually move in the a perfectly straight line. That is almost always the most efficient and least complex option to achieve the goal, after all.
Animals are much more fluid and imprecise in their movement. In media, robots that exhibit that kind of animal movement feel a lot more lifelike. Bottango is animatronic software that will help you create that movement in your robots.
Bell’s robot is a simple quadruped that borrows from both Jorvon Moss’s Crawler Comet and Javier Isabel’s Kame32 designs. It has nine servos (two for each leg, plus one to rotate the head) controlled by a Waveshare ESP32-S3-Zero board through a 16-channel servo driver shield. A DFPlayer Mini MP3 player adds sound effects and power comes from a 2000mAh lithium battery. The mechanical parts were all 3D-printed.
But the real magic comes thanks to Bottango. If you haven’t experimented with that before, I highly recommend it. Bottango is free software that lets you easily create physical animations. I’ve used it myself and can attest to its capability. And best of all, it is easy to use with popular maker hardware.
As Bell demonstrates, you program movements with keyframe positions in a manner similar to digital animation software. Behind the scenes, Bottango does all the complex work of smoothing transitions with different easing options, synchronizing movement, and outputting code. You can either control your robot directly from a computer running Bottango or export the code for standalone use. You can even make it synchronize the motions with music and sound effects.
The result is the kind of lifelike movement that turns robots into loveable characters in Star Wars and so much other media.