Space is one of the fundamentals of dance: a dancer’s body moves in space, and the dance is defined by the way the dancer occupies the physical world over time.
I wanted to make a robot-like object and was inspired by examples of dancing animals that were presented in the non-human cognition course. I found the 'intelligence of body' being demonstrated in those videos awe-inspiring and I decided to work on a 'dancing plant' prototype with relatively simple kinematics, that is expressive and can swing on a beat.
My initial plan was to use a Kinect and let the robot mirror human dance movements. Eventually, I realized it to be more logical if the robot would react on sound instead of vision: that would make it more genuine as a dancer. I used the Openframeworks AudioInputExample class as a base and changed it for beat detection. In the sequence of incoming sound signals, a beat is detected when a signals' amplitude peaks: when it is higher than the previous and the next signal. Openframeworks communicates with an Arduino using OfSerial, and every time a beat is detected, a message is being sent out. Based on these messages, 4 micro servo motors work together to pull the wires that move the robot.
The greatest challenge was making the robots' body. As was demonstrated in the videos mentioned above, there is high complexity and 'embodied intelligence' in the expressiveness of a dancing body. I experimented elaborately making the body, and it was not easy to find the right materials, e.g. a tube that could stand up straight and at the same time was bendable enough to be pulled over by the servo motors.
This first prototype was made for experimentation, and there are a lot of issues that can be further explored in a later stadium. The rhythm sensing of the robot can be improved: during the demonstration ambient sound often disrupted the music being played, and the robot responded to every incoming signal.
The robot as I had in mind was much more flexible and therefore more expressive. In the current setup, the servo motors are not strong enough to pull the body further in different directions. At the same time I discovered how the possibilities but also the limitations of materials, mechanics and physics contribute to the character of a robot-like object. Gradually a personality emerged with looks, poses, movements and musical preferences: Flora likes the Mambo.
Music: Yma Sumac - Goomba Bomba