TABLE 1.

The phases of Zequinha development.

Phase	Year	Movement control	Interaction	Hardware	Software/AI	Conceptual highlights
The chicken and crakovitch	2015 to 2019	MIDI-to-motion mapping via REAPER	Manually choreographed movements, beat by beat, with soundtrack	Handmade built with silicone and polyester resin. PC, custom board, microcontroller (PIC16F84A- microchip technology Inc), mini servo motors	REAPER (DAW), C++	Visual synchronization of movement and sound
Potato head	2022	IMU-based gesture control and audio-level activated robotic mouth controller	Sensorized glove (gesture) and the user’s real-time voice	Foam head, metal structure, and step motors. PC, custom board, drivers for stepmotors, 4 stepmotors (NEMA), glove with gyroscope and accelerometer (MPU-6050), and potentiometer	C++, ESP-NOW protocol (ESP32)	First interactive body interface
Zequinha: first version	Late 2022	Audio command encoding in stereo (audio steganography robotic control)	Choreographed using high-frequency signals embedded in stereo audio	Handmade resin head, PC, ESP32 microcontroller (PIC16F877(A) - microchip technology Inc), 12 servo motors, PWM module PCA9685	C++ (audio signal extraction and motor control)	Manual design and choreographies with music
Zequinha: robotics workshops	2023	Joystick data Input interface + audio feature-based robotic lip-sync	Participatory and collaborative through user audio capture	Joystick-type controller, PC, customized aesthetics by students, and a microphone	Integration with AI-generated voice, LLM, API usage, C++, and python	Cocreation with children, afro-brazilian aesthetic
Zequinha – autonomous (RIW)	2024	Robotic motion control via primitive library + audio feature-based robotic lip-sync	Autonomous conversation with AI and spontaneous gestural movement (still early phase)	PC, microphone, cameras, ESP32, 12 servos, pwm module PCA9685	Python, C++, OpenAI GPT, Google STT, TensorFlow, OpenCV, Librosa, and a diverse ecosystem of libraries	Multimodal pipeline with AI and computer vision