WE, THE ROBOTS

WE, THE ROBOTS is a playful experiment with animal-like robots that aims to explore the idea of collaboration and collective behaviour between robots and humans. It speculates about how we can understand the emerging collaborative flow, in which the performance of these creatures is a mix of man and machine behaviour.

WE, THE ROBOTS presents an installation composed by three robots that can interact with one another and with their environment and establish a simple and effective form of communication with it. Their electronic brains make use of artificial neural networks. These learning algorithms, used in computer science, are inspired by the structure and functional aspects of biological neural networks. After a training process, by repeatedly having a robot perform a reaction to an object approaching its distance sensor, the neural networks learn how to make the robot respond when something enters its sensing field. The training process is slightly different for each robot, which finally results in different characters.

Together, the three robots join to interact with the public, responding to the persons moving in front of them, displaying their characters and provoking empathy, calling for communication between humans and robots.