Cooperative Robotics for Exploring the Intersection of Art and Technology

Michael Burke and I are working in the area of cooperative robotics, exploring the intersection of art and technology with a focus on collaborative robot art.

The first group of our project students built a testbed of networked mobile robots using Raspberry Pi-based mobile robots, with ROS2 as the software framework. We quickly discovered that Raspberry Pi and ROS2 are not well-suited to our needs. The Raspberry Pi’s power consumption is too high, requiring bulky power banks, and while the combination of Raspberry Pi OS and ROS is excellent for complex robotics scenarios, it is overkill for our purposes. Consequently, we designed a new, lightweight robot (see the GitHub repository for SparkNodes).

We are working towards implementing selected algorithms to demonstrate local flocking behaviours, and plan to expand this work to study the dynamics of synchronization and swarming in experimental settings.