New Website - Haunted Pliers

Any recent visitors to this blog may have noticed a disctinct lack of new content. This isn't because I've been going through a quiet period (anything but!) but rather that I've been putting my online efforts into my website Haunted Pliers, which acts as more of a portfolio than blog. Head over there to see some of my recent work in a format that should be easier to navigate than this blog. ...and while I'm here I might as well post this teaser photo of something I built and installed this summer...

Roborigami at Bristol Mini Maker Faire

Roborigami, an installation I work on involving giant origami foxes and hidden robotic elements, was featured as part of Bristol Mini Maker Faire in the foyer of Birstol's most recent museum, the M shed.

Maker Faires are a worldwide series of events associated with the 'maker movement', who are people who make things. This is championed by Make magazine, who prominantly featured Roborigami in a write up of the event.

As the focus of the event was on making we decided that we would create the installation 'live', so attendees could watch the process of cutting, folding and adding electronics to the origami foxes. By the end of the day we had 10 foxes, as shown in this video.




These new foxes are made of plastic, rather than card, making them water resistant. Here's a couple of photos from the event.

We've also started making our own stickers to give out to interested people. Much more fun than a business card :-)

Infocolypse Stack Opening

Juneau Projects' Infocolypse Stack, featuring the drawing robot I created in collaboration with the artists, opened at the Ceri Hand Gallery in London last night. Here are some pictures:

The pictures on the wall were drawn by the robot (at the command of the artists) then painted by the artists

Drawing a beast

Full house!

Musical performance by Juneau Projects using neon robots

Laser cut sculpture

Live drawing

The robot's home and workplace for the next month

Very near the Tate Modern

Working hard

The turn out was incredible, you literally couldn't move for people. The robot was also well recieved and was drawing away all night. It will in fact be drawing continuously for the length of the exhibition, which runs from 22nd February to 23rd March. This will certainly be a test of the actuators (and my software).

I discovered, after returning to Bristol from the opening event, that Wired have written a nice article on the robot.

Here's are some details of the exhibition, which is in the newly opened Ceri Hand gallery, near the Tate Modern. Admission is free.

The collaboration was generously supported by the Watershed, Bristol and was carried out as part of my residency at the wonderful Pervasive Media Studio. You can watch a video documentary detailing the collaboration on my website.

DJ set at The Croft Tonight

Tonight I'll be DJ-ing a Moombahton set at Warren at the Croft's Global Bass special in Stoke's Croft, Bristol.

Here's a link to the facebook event. It's free entry and I'm on 11pm-12am, supporting the Moombahton DJ and producer, Boyfriend. To check out some of my Moombahton mixes please visit my mixcloud page.

January Moombahton Mix

I've started trying to record a monthly DJ mix to put online. December was pretty hectic so this hasn't quite gone to plan so far. Regardless, here is my latest mix. This one goes across a spectrum of Moombahton, which is a relatively obscure brand of electronic dance music with lots of latin american / reggaeton influences. More info and tracklist can be found by following the link through to Mixcloud. As with much of my DJing, I've put quite a few bootlegs in here.

Bah-Mix-Vah4 - Stovetop Moombahton by Peludo on Mixcloud

The mix was made in one take on a couple of (somewhat flakey) second hand Numark Axis CDJs. You can download a mp3 of the mix at soundcloud.

Robot Collaboration with Juneau Projects

As part of my residency at the Pervasive Media Studio, I've begun a collaboration with Juneau Projects, the current artists in residence at the Watershed in Bristol.

Juneau projects create very interesting paintings, sculptures, installations and performances related to nature and technology, as can be read in this article in The Guardian. They began their residency with an interest in using robotics and AI to create artwoks. Following a conversation, where I mentioned my work on the Dada robot with Justin Windle, they asked me to help create a drawing robot that, though it's own emergent behaviour, would create interpretations of images that they had created.

I started work on the project on at the start of Janaury and 11 days later, after our first collaborative integration session (which nearly resulted in me killing my laptop!), we had our first image out of the prototype robot, using protoype test code, as tweeted by Juneau Projects:

"Our robot arm's just done it's first drawing. We're very proud parents. Well done robot! pic.twitter.com/oCL0iQSD"

Believe it or not, the robot was asked to draw a square. For reasons that are a bit too long to explain right now, the resulting blob can be regarded as a success.

The final robot and an associated film will be shown at 31st Jan at the artists in residence wrap up event, at the Watershed (Bristol Hardbourside) where the other artists in residence, Geiger Muller Soundsystem will also be presenting their work. I'll be in attendance (probably fixing the robot!). You can book tickets (£4 including a drink) here: 

Pervasive Media Studio Residency

It's been pretty quiet around the Ad Lab recently, and generally that means that either I've been very lazy or very busy. It's definately the latter.

Since the last post, I was invited (in August 2012) to become a hot-desk resident of the wonderful Pervasive Media Studio (PMS) in Bristol, which has allowed me to formalise my creative technology work while being surrounded by some very interesting people and projects. You can see my studio profile here.

Since starting at the PMS I've begun an exciting collaboration with their resident artists, which I'll report on in another post. I've also given a public talk as part of their 'lunch time talk' series, detailing some of my work in medical haptics alongside the origami foxes, Dada and Milk Pixel. You can read the write up of the talk here.

This Happened Talk Online

A video of the talk I gave at the first 'This Happened...' in Bristol is now online. This happened is a global network of events focusing on interaction design


In this public talk I introduce and discuss the background behind 'The Question', the theatre project I developed the Haptic Lotus for. In particular I used this talk to discuss the chronological development of the project, from my undergraduate interest in haptics to the electronic adaptation of children's games as a way of achieving embodied interaction in a cultural setting.

This is the first public talk I have given where people had to pay an entrance fee (for 3 talks in total). Hence, I felt that the pressure was on to be entertaining (technical details were therefore minimal).

Interview with 'The Engineer'

I was recently interview by The Engineer magazine for an article related to Haptics. Magic Touch: haptics at the man machine interface.

My contribution related to the palpating gripper I designed as part of my research on surgical haptics at BRL.

BBC Radio 1 Interview

Here's a link to an brief video interview I did for BBC Radio 1's newsbeat station on the subject on tele-haptics in surgery

For those not familar with Radio1, it is a station primarily aimed at a young audience, hence I was asked to state things like my age and a question about terminators :-)

Apparently an extended version of the interview (which also featured my colleagues) appeared on the radio, but I can't seem to find a link.

...and here's somebody's very incorrect interpretation of the interview (most of the stuff in here isn't true!): http://www.habbohubforum.net/showthread.php?t=8157

Latest Dada robot drawing

It took me ages to get around to editing this video. The drawing was made back in February, in time for the FITC conference that Justin was presenting at. I guess I forgot about it until then.




Read more about it on the Dada website: http://dada.soulwire.co.uk/2012/04/collaborative-drawing/

Cloud Timelapse

Due to some lab modifications, I've been temporarily relocated next to a window with an awesome view. Here's a timelapse of the clouds last Friday with a bit of Aphex Twin in the background.



I deliberately saturated the colour on the webcam. Somehow it made me think of the cover to Innerspeaker by Tame Impala.

As usual I used a webcam with AnimatorDV Simple+.

L92100 Linear Stepper Motor with Arduino

A few years back I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in using linear actuators for a particular project. They turned up a few days later with this unusual looking motor.

Instead of rotating a protruding shaft, like a regular motor, this motor rotates an internal threaded section (something like a nut). If you hold the motor the way I have in the second picture and activate it then the threaded part rotates. However, if you prevent the threaded section from rotating then the movement of the internal nut pulls the threaded rod through it, with the action of a lead screw.

I couldn't find much documentation from the serial number (ODV76/L92111-P1), so had to do some detective work to figure out how to use it (which is why I'm writing this post). Atually, you can get some data on it by typing 'L92100 linear stepper' into google (rather than all the other characters). Evetually I found this datasheet, and more recently this one too.

It's a 6 wire unipolar stepper so I used the circuit diagram from azega as a base, changing the transistors to N-channel Mosfets (I had some lying around) and not using diodes (I didn't have any lying around). It'd be a good idea to include these at some point.

Here's a video of it working with the Arduino stepper library: 



Currently the motor gets pretty hot during use, which is concerning and somewhat unexpected, as there is no load on there at the moment.

Here's the Arduino code for the movement in the video (a modified version of one of the stepper examples included in Arduino 0022).
 
#include

const int stepsPerRevolution = 200;  // A random value for now

// initialize the stepper library on pins 2 to 5
Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 2,3,4,5);           

void setup() {
  myStepper.setSpeed(60);
  // initialize the serial port:
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println(" down" );
  myStepper.step(-200);
  delay(200);
  myStepper.step(-200);
  delay(200);
  myStepper.step(-200);
  delay(500);
  Serial.println(" up" );
  myStepper.step(600);
  delay(500);
}

I hope all this helps someone...

Recent dada (drawing robot) developments

I've just uploaded a few new updates to the dada project website. These are pre-2012 videos but I hadn't got around to editing / uploading them previously.

Dada is a collaborative project I'm working on with Justin Windle of Soulwire fame. The project had to sit on the backburner for awhile but over the last 6 or so months I've been making some good progress in getting our rescued robot arm up and working and writing some control software (the stuff that comes built in to commercial robots).

For those too lazy to follow the link here's one of the videos, showing a home made solution to self calibration and some grid drawing.

Palpating Gripper Video

This is a video explaining the palpating gripper I have been developing as part of my work on augmenting robotic minimally invasive (keyhole) surgery with haptic (touch) feedback.



The basic premise of the work is that more tactile properties may be determined from an object if it can be actively explored using one or more fingers. To facilitate this sort of exploration inside the body I have been designing a robotic gripper that is simple enough to be manufactured for keyhole surgery but has enough dexterity to replicate some of the exploratory hand motions of a surgeon.

This work has been accepted for publication at IEEE Haptics Symposium 2012.

PhD Thesis Online

I've finally put my PhD thesis online with open access. The title of the work is: "Robust and Intelligent Control Approaches for Biologically Inspired Motion Generation with an Anthropomorphic Robot Arm".

The work attempts to find ways of modelling human motion patterns mathematically and then getting a robot arm to obey those mathematic rules in a safe and efficient manner. A good chunk of these rules dealt with producing optimal motion (in terms of 'effort') that could also deal with the robot having a imperfect model of its own body (for example, we didn't model the friction in the gearboxes). All the control is done dynamically (in terms of forces and torques) rather than kinematically (in terms of positions and angles). This is more difficult but gives more control over the robot.

The below figure shows one of the early results in the thesis, where the robot's reaching motion (to a target height) is based largely on effort minimisation and ends up appearing very human. The person in the image is only included for comparison, the robot isn't copying him.

You can view or download the full pdf of the thesis here.

Paper Accepted for Haptic Symposium

My research on a novel miniture robot gripper for tele-operated palpation has been accepted for presentation at Haptics Symposium 2012 in Vancouver.

Haptics Symposium Logo

Palpation is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as "[to] examine (a part of the body) by touch, especially for medical purposes". 

My submitted paper involved a bio-inspired approach to electromechanical device design, where the finger motions of surgeons were studied during exploratory scenarios in order to set a number of functional objectives for the device. The other design requirements were set by the proposed application of minimally invasive surgery.

Dada Robot - First Drawing

Many years ago I salvaged an ex-industrial robot that was being thrown out of the University research lab I was working in. A crime for sure but I could see why they were getting rid of it. The robot was a collection of metal and motors but little more. No electronics, no power supply, no software. A mere shell of a machine.

Over the last few years I've been nuturing it back to health, building and coding replacement hardware and software. I had to take a break from working on dada (as the robot is known) for quite some time, as I got very stuck on a tricky stepper motor control problem. Recently though I discovered an excellent Arduino library (Accelstepper) that more or less solved the problem for me. Enough so at least that a few weeks ago I got the robot to draw its first picture, which is rather abstract. Here's the sped-up video:



More on dada, including a scanned image of the final picture, and explanation of what is going on, can be found on dada's own site http://dada.soulwire.co.uk/

The dada project is a collaboration with Justin Windle.

Puppet Place Open Day Video

Here's a video from a recent 'open doors' day in Puppet Place, the studio I rent with other members of the creative technology collective RustySquid.



A bunch of the stuff on show was from people who work in the studio, though we had a good number of guest pieces too. You can find out more about each piece by clicking on it in the video.

Keen eyes will spot the Haptic Lotus at 0:42, which was present for hands on demos. Because I couldn't blindfold people or black out the lights as usual (far too much stuff to trip over) I had people follow me around while holding the Lotus. It fully blossomed when they approached the tea and cake stand. Pretty much everyone, robots included, likes tea and cake.

Writing for Guerilla Science

Here's a link to an article I wrote for Guerilla Science on the haptic lotus installation I did with them at Secret Garden Party this summer.

 

 The article will be stored in their archives here: http://guerillascience.co.uk/archives/2490