Cooperative Robotics for Exploring the Intersection of Art and Technology

In 2023, Michael Burke and I started working in the general area of cooperative robotics to explore the intersection of art and technology, focusing specifically on collaborative robot art.

Our project students have started building a testbed of networked mobile robots. They will first implement the algorithms to demonstrate local flocking behaviours. We plan to expand the ideas into studying the dynamics of synchronization and swarming in experimental settings.

The first project is the design and prototyping of a multi-robot light installation, in particular:

• Integrate multiple stand alone robots with existing ROS code for tag based localisation into a global network,

• Implement boids algorithm to control each robot's motion based on the behaviour of other robots nearby,

• Design an appropriate lighting system to best illustrate the flocking behaviour the algorithm generates, and

• Explore additional visualisation techniques using on-board cameras.