Through the implementation of simple rules, elagant humanist behaviors appear to emerge in the behavior of Braitenberg’s little robots.
His notion that artificially implementing natural selection on a table full of robots might yield better robots than careful design got my attention. I think that in cases of simple insect-like behavior this would be an ideal and elegant way of solving ones problem. With the goal of survival in certain conditions and the limited resources of simple logic, it would seem best to use this randomly seeded naturally culled robot group as a starting point. The tremendous amount of time and resources it would consume to build and allow to die a sufficient quantity of robots would be disadvantageous. Also, you would end up with a robot who could survive the conditions the table indefinitely, but you would have no way of knowing how or why, nor would you be certain it could survive in similar conditions. Mother nature had all the time in the world to get it wrong again and again. Humans are in a hurry. Humans should probably stick to engineering.
Candidate robot teeters on edge of cliff, hoping to be fit for habitation of infinite white plane.
Image is stolen clip art, Blur is watermark.

As far as the emotive qualities of lifelike things, there is a lot to be gleaned from insects and other simple organisms. Their nervous systems may be low level enough to practically replicate with current robotic technology. Persson outlines the frank notion that we are way behind being able to actually recreate intelligence in robots, we may as well get good at tricking humans. I find the practicality of this stance somewhat refreshing in a world of missed expectations and lofty aspirations. We’ll get there, relax everybody.

This lil roach bot sure does capture the gesture of the desperate clawing of an insect. Despite the fact that it is being controlled by a human, I instantly ascribe desire and desperation to the mechanical device. Curious.

This little device made by David Bowen must be a version of Braitenberg’s vehicles that has attractive behavior to what it senses (either 2b or 4a). The nice thing about this little bot is that it synthesizes its own power from the source that it is attracted to. The set up is slightly different in that the object of desire is out of reach and so the bot ends up circling around the light source never satisfied.

The following work by Matthew Hebert (posted below) relates to a discussion Adam, Dakotah, Rob and I had regarding where art belongs…. I think we decided that, eventually, inevitably, it seems to always end up, as all life does, buried in a land pit somewhere. Personally, I don’t mind if stuff I make ends up in the garbage. But I don’t really want to get into a discussion about whether art is “wasteful” or not, or whether it should be “useful” or not.

Instead, let’s just check out this project that might excite Adam, since it combines robotics with design & “utilitarian” shit for your home… you know, furniture.

^    This table is kind of “whimsical” (in a when-robotics-hits-Crate-&-Barrel sort of way?). But the designer is obviously a theory dork (<- no negative connotation), since here we see one of Braitenberg’s vehicles!  Maybe 2a style, mentioned on p.6?  Though you might not be able to tell from this not very revealing video, these little robots, imprisoned between two sheets of glass, move in the sun, and stay still in the “shade.” Their motors are most likely attached to light sensors. This creates a nice effect when you put something down on the coffee table, since they will flock to it and hide under it. Would I put this in my home if someone gave it to me? Sure. (But as Bob Bingham would ask, “Is it art yet?”)

Here’s another piece based on simple Braiteneberg architectures: a bench that moves itself into the sun (using light sensors in the front, back, and on both sides, as well as a microcontroller). These benches have solar panels on their seats that charge their battery (except, I guess, when someone’s sitting on one…hmmm….)   Watch out, this video is rather lengthy.

[Do we always have to use that Strauss composition from 2001 when introducing a monolithic design?][yes]

Coming from the “art” perspective: I think these projects could be more interesting if they complicated the nature of braitenberg architectures, perhaps simultaneously complicating the notion of utilitarian furniture. What if these devices were structured not to be useful? If this furniture made use of slightly extended models of braitenbergian forms (see the Lambrinos / Scheier article)… the emergent behaviors might appear more complex. This could get really weird and interesting, if we’re talking about furniture that is reacting to human use. Incorporating “artificial” learning, or the type of seemingly socially intelligent behaviors discussed in the article we read about folk-psychology might turn a table or a chair into something we really have to think about interacting with…. Heidegger would go bananas.

And last, this Hebert guy takes a stab at “art” !!

After all, if there’s one way to be SURE you’re making art …. it’s by putting it in a museum!

This apparently was a commission from the San Diego Museum of Art in 2011 for a weekly series themed around the topic of “what a city needs.”  Here, Hebert says he is approaching this theme “from an interest in power infrastructure and it’s critical importance to the city,” in relation to the often geographical remoteness of most of those forms of power. (Which apparently is especially true in San Diego). Hebert took public domain models from the Google SketchUp library, 3D printed them in ABS plastic, wired electronics to them, and placed them in the museum in what we MIGHT call “non-traditional” locations. Sounds like a well-followed recipe right out o’ the ol’ “art” cookbook to me!

“I started hearing colours in my dreams”

Neil Harrison(b. 1982 in Belfast, Northern Ireland)

CYBORG FOUNDATION | Rafel Duran Torrent from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Eric Singer (b. 19.. in ..)

• Lemur: League of extraordinary musical urban robots

Godfried-Willem Raes (b. 1952 in Gent, Belgium)

• List of Musical Instruments
• List of Publications

Ajay Kapur (b. 19.. in ..)

• on Karmetik

This robot created by Festo listens to a piece of music breaking each note down into pitch, duration, and intensity. It then plugs that information into various algorithms derived from Conway’s “Game of Life” and creates a new composition while listening to one another producing an improv performance. Conway’s “Game of Life” put simply is a 2d environment where cells(pixels) react to neighboring cells based on rules.

They are:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

This algorithm tends to evolve as time passes and created in an attempt to simulate life.

This robot essentially mimics how composers take a musical motif and evolve it over the life of the piece. The robot sets the sensory information from the music played to it as the initial condition or motif and lets the algorithm change it. Since western music is highly mathematical, robots are naturals. I would say this robot has more characteristics human/animal behavior in Wiener’s example of the music box and the kitten. Unlike the music box this robot performs in accordance with a pattern yet this pattern is directly effected by its past.

RoboNaut

The robonaut is the first humanoid robot to come into use in space.

The practicality of this device is obviously quite limited. It is intended as a research platform into humanoid robot presence in later missions.
NASA hopes that by watching the interactions and problems that a robot in a space craft presents, it can improve them to a point where deep-space missions can be unmanned. (more…)

[pardon my screenshot bootleg, sound is pretty bad… go to the link!]

“First ‘chatbot’ conversation ends in argument”

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14843549

This is an interesting example of robot interaction. Two chatbots, having learned their chat behavior over time (1997 – 2011 !) from previous conversations with human “users” are forced to chat with each other. This BBC video probably highlights what we might consider the “human-interest” element of the story, such as the bots’ discussion of “god” and “unicorns” as well as their so-called “argumentative” sides, supposedly developed from users. With these highlights as examples, it does seem fairly convincing proof that learning from human behavior… makes you sort of human-like! This type of “artificial” learning or evolution is really interesting, as it reflects back what we choose to teach the robots we are using:  we really can see that these chatbots have had to live most of their lives on the defensive. I would like to see unedited footage of the interaction. I am sure some of their conversation is a lot more boring. I noticed that the conversation tends towards confusion or miscommunication, almost exemplifying the point about entropy that Robert Weiner makes (p. 20-27): that information carried by a message could be seen as “the negative of its entropy” (as well as the negative logarithm of its probability). And yet, just as it seems the conversation might spiral into utter nonsense (and maybe it does, who knows, this might be some clever editing), the robots seem to pick up the pieces and realize what the other is saying, sometimes resulting in some pretty uncanny conversational harmony about some pretty human-feeling topics. Again, if we saw more of this chat that didn’t become part of a news story, I wonder if this conversation might slip more frequently into moments of entropic confusion. (I think those moments of entropy can tell us as much about the bots’ system of learning as their moments of success (as Heidegger / Graham Harman might say, we only notice things when they’re not working… though I kinda like lil wayne’s version from We be steady mobbin:  If it ain’t broke, don’t break it)….

If we view chatbots as an analogue to the types of outside-world-sensing robots we are trying to build, only with words as both their input and output, this seems to show that they really are capable of the type of complex feedback-controlled learning that Weiner suggests (p.24) and that Alan Turing was gearing up for. This experiment is not unlike the really amazingly funny conversation in the Hofstadter reading between “Parry” (Colby), the paranoid robot, and “Doctor” (Weizenbaum), the nondirective-therapy psychiatrist robot (p.595). So, actually, BBC’s claim that this was the “first chatbot conversation” isn’t quite right…

Nonetheless, perhaps an experiment worth trying again on our own time?

• Cybernetics: A Short History
• Research Assignment 2: Discussion and Presentations:
  • Weiner: “The Human Use of Human Beings”, pp. 15-28
  • Hofstadter: pp. 590-599
  • Pickering: pp. 37-48
  • Brooks: “Intelligence without representation”
• Synthetic Psychology: Brighten Vehicles
  • introduction to braitenberg vehicle and various applications / extensions
  • “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology”: original braitenberg book
  • “Extended Braitenberg Architectures”, Lambrinos, 1995: multimodal braitenberg extension for combining several behaviors.
  • Breve: Dynamic simulation environment
• Emergent Behavior
  • Flocking
  • Synching

In general, the dryness of this text left me frustrated with the notions of utility and purposefulness. Was the article useful? Yes, I guess. Is its view that robots should serve as usefully as this text? Yes, perhaps even more so. So I came up with my own criteria for a robot that might un-service us as the antithesis. I was hoping to dig up an example of something really silly, but well made — without purpose, but suggestive of or referential to something interesting, critically or philosophically. And last criteria: aesthetically pleasing? (Or at least perhaps visually referential to something outside robotics?)  I was pretty excited by the predator slugbot (p.49) and the ecobot that converts dead flies to electrical energy (p.53), both cited in the text. But damn, they look awful. And they suggest future improvement to humanity! Yikes, that sounds useful. So I’m not sure I’ve found any artist-made useless robots that really strike the note I’m looking for.

Instead of following the assignment exactly, per se, let me drag you through the mud that was my search tonight:

1) Non-aesthetic, utilitarian end of the spectrum: Seal Whisker Sensors

web.mit.edu/towtank/www/sealWhiskers.html

Oooo, sensor development! Obviously this is more on the straight science side, using biomimetic approach to robot design, and at this stage is purely utilitarian in order for AUVs to feel wakes….  Not unrelated to the Bristol Robotics Lab Scratchbot (p.55). But, hey, maybe it gives you underwater camera ideas, doesn’t it, Garret Brown?

But, NOT WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR.

4) Douglas Repetto’s “Nearly Human” project

music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/nearly_human/

“Nearly Human (one billionth of a human brain) is a deeply flawed physical metaphor for a human brain.

Like many brain (and other biological) metaphors, it is much too simple and mostly wrong. But it’s also an attempt at being a little bit right in ways that are non-typical for popular representations of brains.”

This seems pretty far on the “Art” side of the spectrum, and arguably might not be a robot, because I am not so sure there are any sensors in that mess. However, I think this project deals with some of the things discussed in the article as subject matter in an interesting way, since as you will see in Repetto’s notes, he is thinking about the role of metaphor in human-intelligence research, as well as the absurdity of the idea of even coming close to replicating the human brain.

Okay, weird. Cool. BUT NOT WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR.

1) Bartending robot

W/  touch-sensitive “skin” …

“Silly?” Check minus (not quite silly ENOUGH). Well made? Check. Without purpose? Uncheck, check, uncheck, check, whatever. If we debate this, we may be debating if alcohol truly serves a purpose. This ambiguity makes it all the more interesting. So, is it referential / suggestive of something interesting, critically speaking? Yeah, sure. An alcohol-serving machine / “companion” references the complexities of the questionable utility of recreational drugs, etc, and could be said, as you purchase your drink from it, to reiterate the numbing virtual structures of internet-era capitalism, eliminating the job of a grungy bearded or breasted barista who would stand in its place otherwise (whoa! but I think I’m giving it too much credit)… After all, who better to question what the model might be for the perfect human companion than the bartender?

However, do I find this bartender aesthetically interesting or pleasing? Rehhh. No. Falls into all the tropes of Robot-servitude and the aesthetic of plasticized human-features that I find fatiguing. The bowtie even throws it back to the butler-bots of science fiction, the analogue slave days of robotics! This stuff is amusing, but not what I’m looking for.  The aesthetic and style of interaction seems to harken the text’s reference to conversational bots (In the humanoid robot companion section in the Robotic Futures chapter), which is written with a level of utility in mind that seems to pull the whole idea back into the realm of medicine or assembly line production. Maybe I don’t want a good lookin’ or a nice talkin’ bartender?

So, nice bartender? NOT WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR.

ALTHOUGH, this might be closer: www.gizmag.com/inebriator-robot-bartender/23974/

2) (Not unrelated to above) : Robotic Chefs

www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/18/robot-chefs_n_1601634.html

But equally problematic, in my humble opinion (from the point of view of “as art project,” perhaps)….

NOT WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR.

Okay, mission failed. But there’s some okay reverse-inspiration here.