Technocultural research into robotics.

  • Robotronica

    Robotronica

    An event such as Robotronica, in Brisbane on the 18th of August 2013, reveals how popular robots are with the general public. QUT’s new Science and Engineering Centre was packed with curious families, shuffling from exhibition to demonstration.

  • Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day

    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)

    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.

  • Robot searching in belief space: field robots and their contingent encodings of unknown environments [CODE Abstract]

    Robot searching in belief space: field robots and their contingent encodings of unknown environments [CODE Abstract]

    Robotics research since the 1980s has been establishing codes, conventions and practices that are likely to govern a generation of autonomous robots that is becoming ready for the field. Today’s engineering choices will define the domains of possibility for robots that will inhabit domestic, public and professional spaces in the future.

  • Research on the air: mine automation near Karratha

    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

    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

    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.

  • Shut the gate! It’s the self-driving Google car

    Shut the gate! It’s the self-driving Google car

    This is a close-up of the kind of robot car that Google first talked about last year, and was reported in the New York Times among other outlets. This demo is appropriately connected with a TED event. This is not only a demonstration that the car works. It’s a geeky expression of robot car machismo.

  • Exoskeleton gait

    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.