Digital Theatre by Nadja Masura

Author:Nadja Masura
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030556280
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Digital Theatre with robots and humans raises important questions about the implications of robotics in a way which is safe and accessible to the public, thus educating the audience, and sometimes the creatives and scientists involved as well.

Production Example: Baxter, the Robot Actor

In 2015 Arizona State University (ASU) director Lance Gharavi introduced the author to a very special actor, named Baxter.8 Previously, Gharavi had been approached by Emerge 2014, an annual festival at Arizona State University bringing together artists, scientists, writers, and engineers, “to imagine and design the future of the human experience” (Gharavi 2014) to create a show involving a robot. The collaboration between arts and sciences focused on human interaction with (and perception of) robots. Ideally, by making a robot actor more human through mirrored and responsive gestures in this type of public appearance, the idea of robots would become more accessible to society.

According to Gharavi, the project was mutually beneficial to artists and robotics engineers. The collaboration allowed them to explore: “what robots teach us about being human, how to get machines to move in a more natural fluid human fashion, a more embodied way of interacting with a robot, how can we make robots more sociable and approachable, and how to move and behave like a human in expressive manor.” Thus, in a sense the performance experiment was enacting a meeting-place between science and art, and a meeting-place between future and present.

In the ASU lab, surrounded by computer stations, drones, bits, and pieces of equipment, was Baxter, a simplified torso with arms. It was a bulky, red unit about five feet tall, that reminded one somehow of Legos, or another brightly colored plastic toy, with arms that looked like they could crush you to death and a monitor and sensors for a head. There were no legs to speak of, but a stalk and wheels for movement. Baxter was bought for a NASA project to pick up moon rocks, and created for repetitive industrial tasks (like lifting items in an Amazon warehouse). This project allowed for exploration of its further capabilities. The system uses Kinect as machine vision, allowing the robot to look at person’s movement and in Gharavi’s words, “interpret it based on his knowledge or grammar and not dumb mimicry – it is autonomous intelligent [intuitive] behavior. Exhibiting characteristics of autonomy and that’s a big jump forward.”

Baxter’s programmer, Si Vernprala, said there are three types of robot functionalities: (1) preprogrammed (2) motion-sensor mirroring, and (3) completely autonomous behavior. They were currently programming movement primitives to allow it to construct its own version of movement. The stages of progress are analogous to building a language structure; moving from creating letters, to words, to sentences. At the time, Vernprala said they had discovered “not the alphabet [itself], but how to create an alphabet.” They are working on creating a responsive robot movement model adaptable to any robot. They also explored the constraints and limitations, getting to know the “sphere of movement.” Future exploration will include Leban movement.

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