Jurassic Park Booth - Animatronic Velociraptor

This was my final project with Carnegie Mellon TPEG. For CMU's 2025 Spring Carnival, TPEG partnered with CMU's Sustainable Earth club to create a Jurassic Park themed booth. For this, I lead a team of club members to create an Animatronic Velociraptor head, with the goal of achieving a "jumpscare" effect as part of the booth's escape room game. With our final design, we achieved eyeball, eyelid, and jaw motion which resulted in an expressive figure. While the figure was originally designed to swing in and out of a "window" to be revealed from hidden, this feature was cut from the final installation after the support structure sustained damage during inspection.

As team lead, I was responsible for setting and managing the project timeline, leading group brainstorming and work sessions, coordinating purchasing, and managing storage and installation logistics. Additionally, as the sole Electrical Engineer, I took on the role of Controls Engineer. For this, I designed and built the electrical hardware to drive the 3 servo motors and 1 DC wiper motor which controlled the animatronic's motion. These were then controlled using an Arduino microcontroller, which interfaced with the show control Unity project through serial communication.

Project Team
Matthew Saenz - Project Lead, Controls Engineer
Namky Eun Llovet - Mechanical Engineer, Support Structure Design
Jessica Wu - Mechanical Engineer, Animatronic Skull Design and Jaw Motion Mechanical Design
Audrey Chen - Mechanical Engineer, Eyeball and Eyelid Mechanical Design
Sophie Howard - Costume Designer, Animatronic Surfaces