A hyena's ears play a major role in communication with other hyenas. The pictures below show the two positions that the hyenas ears must be able to mimic. The left picture shows the excited/aggressive state with the ears forward. The picture to the right show a more submissive/defensive state with the ears back, much like a dogs would be when it is relaxed. The hyena in the right picture may seem like it is aggressive, but it is really trying to protect itself.   The video below is our first attempt at creating the hyena ear mechanism. While the motion and design was fairly close to the final product, the operation is not reliable or robust for our robot. The main problem was that the gears on the motor are coupling to the U-shaped metal at a 90 degree angle. This is difficult to do especially with the materials we had available to us at the time. We later found that a parallel gear configuration is more realistic. The video below is our final product for our hyena ear mechanism. As you can see the gears are parallel and operates much more smoothly which saves power and limits the noise of the machine. The motion is a forward and back operation. The speed and position of the motor can be controlled easily with the graphical user interface. Below is a picture of the model hyena's head after it was been carved or hollowed out. The piece missing was removed with an exact o-knife which allows the "skull cap" to be placed back on seamlessly. The above mechanism fits in the head and allows full range of motion for the ears to move as a hyena's would.  To resemble an actual hyena we needed to make the above mechanism look real. To do this, we attached taxidermy ears that are similar to the shape of a hyena ears to the U-shaped metal bracket. Together this system looks and moves as a real hyena's ears would! |
Hyena Ears |