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.

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: 

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/

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.

Dynamixel Master / Slave network with Matlab

Following my last post I've now got two dynamixels working on the same network with Matlab. The flexibility of these servos means that one can be used just as a position sensor. This lets you do some cool stuff, like this simple tracking controller, where one servo follows the other. This is known as a master / slave network. The moving one is the slave as it obeys the master.



To make this work you need to set the ID of each dynamixel differently. This is obvious, but without the Dynamixel Wizard from Robotis (which didn't work on my machine) I had a hard time trying to figure out how to make this happen. In the end I discovered that by using the following command with an ID of 254 you can broadcast a new ID to every servo on the network.

(calllib('dynamixel','dxl_write_byte',254,3,new_ID))

So, just connect one servo to the network and broadcast it a new ID!

The Matlab source code for the master slave demo can be downloaded here.

IMPORTANT! - You won't feel the forces from the slave servo on the master. Do not stick your finger or anything else in the way to check!

'DADA' blog launched

DADA is a collaborative project between myself and Justin Windle, a feelance Interactive Designer and Developer who's work is often based on generative illustrations that merge hand drawn elements with computer generated structure.

DADA stands for 'Dynamic Autonomous Drawing Agent' and is the name given to a project that aims to construct a robot capable of drawing in a variety of media. The hardware platform is a recycled 3dof pick and place robot that was custom built for Thames Water some years ago.

Following retierment the robot was donated to the University of Reading who extracted various elements of the system, leaving a body with motors but no power or control. Luckily I happened to be in the right place and the right time and intercepted the robot before it arrived at its final destination, the skip. That was over 4 years ago and since that time the robot has sat immobile under various tables until this project came along.



While Justin works on creating the images that the robot will eventually draw I am working on turning the currently broken and incomplete shell of a machine into something capable of drawing the images that will merge the robot's mechanistic form and purpose with the organic nature of generative art that Justin creates.

The project's blog can be found at http://dada.soulwire.co.uk/about