Technocultural research into robotics
Edited by Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Speeding beyond the human
Most robots I’ve seen move at a very deliberate pace. The computational challenge of processing multiple signals, and deciding what to do next (while not draining the battery too much) mean that most research robots take a long time to do pretty much anything.
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I am a robot
Seb Chan pointed me to this irresistible piece of lo-tech, 8-bit, robot dub reggae.
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Digital Humanities meets Robotic Humanities
On Friday December 10, I suggested a new term for our field of research: Robotic Humanities, the deployment of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences traditions in field of robotics (see my slides). Of course this Robot/Arts intersection is not new at all, as Simon Penny will talk about this Friday.
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Simon Penny: 60 Years of Situated Machines – Robotic Art as a site for technical and aesthetic innovation, activism and intervention
This keynote will attempt to provide a context for the assessment of the contemporary condition of robotic cultural practices by reviewing the history of the field and the history of pertinent ideas and debates.
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Economist articles on robotics
The Economist has published some articles on robotics recently: eye robots and artificial intelligence.