Distinguished Research Seminar Series

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be speaking at University of Wales' Robotic Intelligence Laboratory as part of their invited seminar series. My talk will be on the subject of my PhD: Biologically Inspired Reaching Techniques for Humanoid Robots.

The talk will be streamed through the virtual research centre in personal robotics though I'm afraid you have to be a member of the research centre to watch it. I'll see if there is someway I can get a recording of the stream to post online.

ACC publication

A paper I submitted to the 2010 American Control Conference (ACC) has been accepted for presentation and publication in the conference proceedings.

The paper is titled "An Optimal Sliding Mode Controller Applied to Human Motion Synthesis with Robotic Implementation" and describes a new type of nonlinear controller that I developed with my PhD supervisors Dr. Guido Herrmann and Professor Chris Melhuish.

Milk Pixel in Realtime magazine

Milk Pixel has been featured in issue #95 of the Australian contemporary arts magazine Real Time. The article 'Coders, Crafters and Crooks' is a report on the Craftivism and Uncraftivism events at the Arnolfini (many videos of which are now available on the uncraftivism wiki). Here's what it says about us:

"Flickering from across the room was Milk Pixel built by the Bristol Robotics Lab, an inspired re-use project incorporating LEDs into two-litre plastic milk bottles. The 64 bottle/pixel array continuously responded to sound performances and moving image in unexpected collaborations and improvisations."

Interestingly the picture chosen to head the article (shown above) was one I took of Jason and Paul (from Potential Indifference) debugging MilkPixel a day or so before the event. It's nice to think that the editors thought that the hands-on sorting of a tanlge of ribbon cable and recycled junk represented the craftivism movement to such a degree.

The Article was written by Melinda Rackham, an Emerging Artforms Curator and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University.

Just for the record, MilkPixel no longer flickers, we fixed that bug :-)

Haptic Theatre Update

An online update of the collaborative project I'm working on with Extant (Britain's only professional performing arts company of visually impaired people), has appeared on the News Flash section of the Extant website.

The project involves "creating an immersive dramatic environment that invited audience members will explore using a specially designed hand held Haptic device. Currently the team of project partners, artists and engineers are working on areas of script development, sound and set design, and technical construction of the device and its support system, along with sensory trigger mechanisms to connect different elements of the installation".
For more details please visit http://www.extant.org.uk/question.html

Potential Indifference

Quite recently my application to get Milk Pixel included on the Southbank Bristol Arts Trail was accepted. Great stuff! As the application form was intended only for a single person or group it was necessary to create a name for myself and the three other guys that built Milk Pixel.

And so it my great pleasure to officially anounce our Digital Art collective: Potential Indifference. Those in the know will realise that this is quite similar to the official description of Voltage. The second reason for this name is that this is how our work may be viewed, we sit somewhere between engineering and art but not sure if we really impress people from either discipline...

Potential Indifference consists of:

Ad Spiers (Me), Paul O'Dowd, Thomas Burton and Jason Welsby

I used Soulwire's brilliant Glitch Generator to generate the glitches in the Potential Indifference logo. Lots of fun to be had with that thing.

The Southbank Bristol Arts trail will take place on the weekend of 8th & 9th May 2010. More details to follow about where to find Milk Pixel.

Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine

A very original take on a drawing robot discovered on we make money not art. Rather than the robot simply drawing your portrait the robot actually moves your own hands around so that you are guided to produce the portrait yourself.

Here's the blurb: "The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow."

I particularly like the fact that the user (or used) has a pen in each hand, particularly unnatural...

CandleBot Finished!

After a solid Geekend of coding, CandleBot (a phospholuminescent drawing robot) is finished, well, my part of it is at least...
From it's humble beginings as an open loop perlin noise → joint angles system (which made some nice random curves) CandleBot has developed to this system capable of interfacing to any serial comms to draw trajectories. Here is a video of a few shapes communicated from processing.



Candlebot was developed to it's current stage as a platform for prototyping the low-level embedded motion controllers of Dada, a larger and more ambitious mini industrial robot that will also be used for drawing. CandleBot is now on it's way to Justin Windle (Soulwire) who will be taking care of the high level coding on the PC/Mac side that is necessary to get the robot to drawing something more worthwhile. In the mean time I'll be adding the extra embedded layers of code necessary to get the CandleBot drawing code working on Dada.