This Purple Dragon Is an Adorable Shoulder-Mounted Companion Robot
The key to building a great robot familiar seems to be in giving it personality, and Angela Sheehan’s robot dragon, Nova, has lots of it.
A couple years ago, our very own Alex Glow built Archimedes, a "robot owl familiar” that is worn on her shoulder. Since then, Glow has redesigned the robot, given presentations about it, and Archimedes has gained quite a few fans. Some of those fans have even built their own shoulder-mounted companion robots. Jorvon Moss recently created a cute monkey robot named Dexter, and Angela Sheehan made a purple dragon robot that responds to head rubs.
The key to building a great robot familiar seems to be in giving it personality, and Sheehan's robot dragon, named Nova, has lots of it. Nova is covered in fluffy fur, has a very long tail, flapping LED-lit wings, and expressive glowing eyes. Most importantly, Nova has a touch sensor on her head that allows her to respond to affectionate strokes. Nova will normally luxuriate with small, relaxed movements, but a touch will cause her to flap her wings in joy. Those behaviors are, of course, programmable, and Sheehan can alter them to change Nova’s personality if she wants to.
Sheehan constructed Nova using mostly components from Adafruit. Those include a Feather M0 board with a built-in RFM69HCW packet radio, NeoPixels, and a Flora Color Sensor. Sheehan originally used that color sensor for her color-stealing fairy costume, and that capability works with Nova, too. Scanning a color with the sensor will cause Nova’s LEDs to change to that color. Servo motors are used to flap the wings and tilt the head. Most of the mechanical parts were 3D-printed and the head appears to have been sculpted by hand. We certainly hope others pick up on the companion robot trend if they all turn out as well as Nova did.