CaptAnt

CaptAnt is a sentient, tweeting ant-bot. Yes, that's right. CaptAnt is a toy robot ant whose mission it is to inform people of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence and nudges humanity to take responsibility for technology by posting pictures of the people it sees on Twitter. This project was made for the Tech-Art Festival GOGBOT.

CaptAnt walks around in a crowd in a way decided by an actual ant. The position of the ant who lives on a small platform is communicated to CaptAnt who moves dependent on said position. CaptAnt then walks around, taking pictures of people and puts these on twitter with a shocking quote.

I was working on the electrical systems and controller software. The system consisted of a Raspberry Pi with a camera attached, an Arduino, two motors and LED's. The Raspberry Pi runs face-recognition software written by me. It uses OpenCV to take a picture when a face is detected. This picture is then uploaded to Twitter with a random insult or a quote about technology. The Raspberry Pi also communicates with the platform where the real ant is moving on in order to get movement information which is then sent to the Arduino to move the motors.

Fun fact: if you go to the twitter profile of CaptAnt, you can still see the testing tweets, including the first tweeted pictures. These were made somewhere late at night and the first picture shows me eagerly waiting for the program to work (commented with a nice insult). The second picture captured my reaction after seeing that it succeeded.

No ants were hurt during this project.