Tag: drawing robots

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Research

Art, Technology, and Collaboration: A Robot Drawing Workshop with the Pitt Pirates Robotics Team

The Pitt Pirates Robotics Team (PPR) participated in a two-day workshop to learn about and build drawing robots. The drawing robots are tools with basic moving capabilities (forward, backward, right, and left) that draw on a large canvas via a web browser interface. The students from PPR were highly engaged with the technology and system of tools under investigation in this workshop. They represented middle school and high school students from Pitt County schools, North Carolina who are specifically interested in robotics, programming, and technology.

The workshop activities included building a drawing robot, which was programmed using a raspberry pi. The pi was flashed with our drawbots software package which is available via github. The students built the robots and then used terminal to access their robot via its IP address, which was assigned by our access point/network. 

For the remaining duration, participants worked with the tools to explore, experiment, and play with the different digital and analog making activities to understand the technologies in use. Through this process, they were encouraged to build beyond the steps provided to construct and contribute their own ideas. 

The workshop was designed and implemented to address the socio-technical systems that emerge when people work collaboratively ‘through and with’ augmented technical tools in a design making process. The workshop attempted to (1) foster new ways of thinking and making through play and experimentation (2) affect social interactions and empower people to become producers (3) affect relationships between collaborators and the technologies in use through transparent processes.

The results of this investigation were submitted as part of a new publication called “Critical and Collaborative Making with Augmented Tools” in the conference proceedings of DRS 2020 (Design Research Society) Conference that will be held next August in Brisbane, Australia.

For additional information about this research, see a previous investigation with the robots in a museum setting and a previously published paper. This research is completed in collaboration with Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Associate Professor in Graphic Design at Michigan State University.

Categories
Travel

A weekend in Michigan: Exhibitions, Robots, and MSU

A few weeks ago, I made my first trip to Michigan and traveled from Detroit to East Lansing to visit my collaborator, Rebecca Tegtmeyer at Michigan State University. She and I have been working together remotely since 2013 researching design collaboration & technology, and have been developing collaborative drawing robots since about 2015. You can see some previous posts about our research here:

Expanding the Robot Family: An update in collaborative drawing tools and speculating future design possibilities

Exploring the Wild and Weird on Vancouver Island with Design Inquiry

Since we published and presented work last year, we have been working on many types of technical upgrades to our drawing robots including enhancing movement and drawing capabilities through physical (hardware) and digital (software) development. We are also developing interface upgrades with new drawing functionalities. With so many new developments going on, this past year has been a divide and conquer sort of year, where the main goal has been to prototype and test as many new robots and drawing platforms as possible.

Sweet Tea, one of Rebecca’s new robots (built in collaboration with partner Tom Nelson), was recently featured at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in the MSU Faculty Triennial show. Sweet Tea is the first robot in the family to be featured in a gallery space and she can receive texts from museum-goers (and anyone really who has her number) and responds to them by drawing. Either forward, back, right, left, she responds to commands and draws on the canvas in real-time. The result becomes a series of collaborative drawings between all participants who engage with the project.

With some institution funding, I was able to travel to MSU for the opening reception, and we met with Michelle Word, Director of Education, Brian McLean, Manager of Public Programs, and Meghan Zanskas, Museum Educator: K–12 and Family Programs to discuss the possibilities of a robot workshop for the upcoming “Future Lab,” part of MSU Science Festival, focused on STEAM education.

During my visit, we also spent some time in Detroit and walked along the Riverfront Conservancy, looking across the river to Canada. We stopped in the historic Guardian Building to admire the art deco architecture and rode through Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project.

Categories
Research

Expanding the Robot Family: An update in collaborative drawing tools and speculating future design possibilities

This article is an update on my collaborative drawing robots: an ongoing research project that emerged around 2015 with colleague Rebecca Tegtmeyer, after a series of investigations exploring the role of technology in design collaborations.

To see a former post, click here: New Research in Development: Remote Drawing Robot

This past year, we were able to expand on our research and present our findings in multiple professional contexts. The first included a presentation in a small, intimate group setting at Design Inquiry.  This experience provided valuable insight that led to a more formal paper presentation at the 12th European Academy of Design (#EAD12) Conference, Design for Next, in Rome, Italy this past April. This paper, Speculating the Possibilities for Remote Collaborative Design Research. The Experimentations of a Drawing Robot, was published this fall by Taylor & Francis. The work has also been exhibited at the San Francisco State University Design Gallery. The exhibit, Inside/Outside: Working Our Way Out of the Damaged Now (Design as Dialectics), ran from Feb. 16 through March 30, 2017.

The work explores how the use of present technologies speculate future possibilities for remote design collaboration, where interactions and exchanges are limited to those mediated by technological devices. Specifically, we are interested in how the use of present technologies support remote-collaborative making that takes place off the screen, in non-digital formats, in the physical environment.

Figure_3

In this configuration, I am “Researcher A” (collaborating from Memphis) and my primary role is to drive the robot from the web interface; I am connected to the physical location (in Michigan) via WiFi in real-time to draw with the robot.

Figure_4

While, Rebecca, aka. “Researcher B” (collaborating from Michigan) acts as the facilitator by managing the collaborative-making experience in the physical space; she sets up the space and guides decisions on mark-making tools.

We have worked with this configuration in both Memphis and Michigan, exchanging roles of driver and facilitator, and working with two robots.

roverandel.jpgMemphis robot, Rover (left) and Michigan robot, El (right)

By drawing from existing technologies across multiple categories of tools including live video streaming, live editing tools, and drawing machines, these robots alter the experiences of remote collaborations. Through experimental making activities that prioritized a collaborative process over outcomes, we created numerous abstract artifacts.

Figure_7Figure_8

The work above shows some of the pieces we have exhibited and published over the last year. This year, we have new goals for expanding this project on multiple fronts. We are currently working on building new robots to experiment with different features for movement and drawing.

The above two robots (left is named Sunny, right is named Hal) are currently being designed in Memphis. Sunny and Hal both have different driving capabilities, using multiple servo motors to control movement of the robot itself as well as additional arm attachments that can move peripherals like the camera and drawing tools. 

Our longer-term goals include creating a website that will run on a cloud network so that we can open access to other users, which would also include upgrading the drawing interface that runs in the browsers. We also want to package the robot with instructions for future collaborators. In order to do this, we are working on simplifying the process—robot assembly, pi set up, network set up, interface access, and studio set up—with the goal of expanding the project.