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Spiders From Mars?
Ken Rinaldo and Matt Howard create artificial life robotic creatures with undergraduate research assistant Ross Baldwin.
Imagine a group of large robotic spiders, that move like ants, see like bats and twitter like electronic birds . . . and interact with the people around them. Sound far-fetched? Not so for Ken Rinaldo, associate professor, Art & Technology at The Ohio State University, who opened his new artificial life robotic installation—The Autotelematic Spider Bots—earlier this month at the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens in England.
The installation was commissioned by and is one of the featured pieces at AV Festival 06, an international festival of digital arts, film, music, games and new media. In June, the interactive work will travel to the Itau Cultural Museum in Brazil where the robots’ recharge stations will get energetics from the sun.
The Spider Bots, Rinaldo explains, “are 10 spider-like sculptures that interact with the public in real-time, and self-modify their behaviors based on their interaction with the viewer, themselves, their environment and their food source.” He says the robots “see” with long-distance ultrasonic eyes. They communicate with each other through Bluetooth communications technology, which allows them to pass “digital pheromones” and share the location of the food source, which is a recharge rail. They were modeled in 3D software and define a new morphology for a hexapod robot never before attempted. The pieces are constructed of colorful rapid prototyped plastics donated by Laser Reproductions in Ohio.
“This research will, we hope, uncover the possibility
of an autonomous series of spider-like robots that act like ants and can structurally couple with their environment and find their “food” through intercommunication,” Rinaldo says.
For more on Rinaldo’s robotic spiders, see
www.avfest.co.uk/press/KennethRinaldo_Spiderbots or kenrinaldo.com |
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