Category: Blog Post
-
Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day
The search for robots does not always end with finding discrete autonomous actors. The picture is more complex. In March, I travelled 7 hours West to visit the Open Day at Rio Tinto’s copper mine at Northparkes NSW (near Parkes) on March 2 2013. This visit was an opportunity to experience and understand some of…
-
Mining automation, displaced labour and materialities of communication (Cultural Studies 2012)
Information systems, remote operation and robotics are currently being introduced into mines around the world. As miners reconfigure communication, control and labour, mining practices that have barely changed in a century are being transformed.
-
Research on the air: mine automation near Karratha
Mine sites are changing, as robotic technologies are taking on communication and control roles previously held by people. These changes have been coming for some time, but there has recently been a shift from trialling autonomous systems towards using them in production.
-
Robot Stories at Platform Politics Conference in Cambridge
Recently I presented a paper called ‘Materialising robot platforms’ on the affordances, environments and networks of three Korean service robots. The topic of my paper was something of an outlier in a conference called ‘Platform Politics’ at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, organised by Jussi Parrika and Joss Hands. Most other papers identified either with political…
-
Acting the part
Any robot that moves, performs. But those robots that are built or programmed explicitly to perform can accentuate a repertoire of multiply articulated gestures with naturalistic movements and interaction.
-
Exoskeleton gait
In the tradition of bionics, wearers strap a motorised assemblage to their body, and the device senses nerve signals running through the limbs, and amplifies these into movements. It is designed for people with poor mobility (broken leg, aged etc) and rehabilitation.
-
Self-designing resilient robot gaits
The robot from Cornell University in this video ‘generates a conception of itself’ and improvises ways of moving around. At startup, the design has been left incomplete, and the robot itself finishes the design.
-
Economies of the gait in robotics and animation
How a robot walks, runs and jumps is critical to how it moves through its environment. Beyond these instrumental questions, how a robot moves can’t help establishing a sense of its perceived character. We’ve faced these questions of movement, embodiment and identity before — in animation.
-
Auto-paternalism
The mobile sensing system Mobileye uses a single camera, mounted on the windscreen, to judge whether the car is drifting out of the lane, or about to hit a vehicle, pedestrian, or kangaroo. It can give up to 2.7 seconds warning if it calculates there is a potential collision.