Category Archives: Empathy Swarm

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Electronics, Empathy Swarm, Robot Anatomy |

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Making of: Dissection of the robots

We just wanted to share some more impressions of the scale of this state of the project: 10 robots – that’s a lot of parts!!! And even some of the SMD parts are still in boxes as they would just get lost with a size of half a millimeter x a millimeter!!

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

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Empathy Swarm, Open-Studio, Robotics, Studio |

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Open-Studio swarming with our guests

Some impressions of a busy night, full of emotions, enjoying the robots and explaining the backgrounds to our guests.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Empathy Swarm, Event, Open-Studio, Residency, Studio |

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OPEN-STUDIO this Friday 31.08.2018 6 PM

Hey everyone!

We would like to invite you to our open-studio in Zagreb at the Academy of Fine Arts at Ilica 85.

Starting from 6 pm we invite you to check out our nice studio that we spent our EMARE residency with KONTEJNER at.

Electronics, etching, 3D-printing, camera tracking, emotion recognition — of course a lot of ROBOTS and FUN 🙂

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Robotics |

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Silent Running: Robertina and Kryten

With the dear help of professor Zorislav Šojat from Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, we finally managed to make the robots smooth and silent. 🙂

Learning about interrupt functions to get the update rates of the WiFi communication and the sending of PWM values to the brushless DC motors  independent of each other!

See Robertina and Kryten rolling smoothly on the grey “NASA” floor of the studio, while the prototyping of the next generation is in full work mode
–  10 robots to be seen soon, with new body and battery management!

 

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Residency, Robotics |

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First steps of robot prototype Kryten on the streets of Zagreb!

Just playing on the streets of Zagreb…collecting data with Adam Donovan, Katrin Hochschuh and Tomislav PokrajÄŤić ;)#emare #robots #emotiondetection #empathyswarm #hochschuhdonovan

Gepostet von KONTEJNER | biro suvremene umjetniÄŤke prakse am Dienstag, 26. Juni 2018

 

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

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Empathy Swarm, Residency |

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Our EMAP/ EMARE Residency continues: Happy to be back in Zagreb!

We are back in Zagreb and continue to work on Empathy Swarm in our studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in the middle of the city center and with a nice green park to have a break from time to time.

Thanks KONTEJNER for all the preparation and fantastic hosting! Looking forward to having our newest prototype Kryten rolling around and soon some more swarm friends for him.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

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Electronics, Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Studio |

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Tool chain for next prototype is ready: from PCB-Design and Exposure Box to Etching Tank and SMD-Reflow-Oven

We just made the next step in the development of our Empathy Swarm project: We set up a working tool chain for the production of the next robot prototype!

While our previous prototypes Robert and Robertina had a lot of cables, we now dramatically reduced the number of cables by designing and producing custom-made PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards). This does not only increase the robot’s robustness, it also reduces the production time and complexity during the assembly of the individual robot – and imagine producing 100!

The circuit is designed on the computer in form of a black and white image where all the connections are represented in black while the gaps in between are white. This image is then printed out with a laser printer onto a transparency foil. This transparency foil is used together with a pre-sensitized positive photoresist PCB, which initially looks like an empty copper plate. In order to transfer the circuit design onto this photoresist  PCB, the transparency foil is fixed to it and both are put into the UV light exposure box so that all the empty ‘white’ parts are exposed while the toner of the black ink is preventing the exposure.

In our special case we designed a double sided PCB which can have circuits on either side that are connected through pins. It is necessary that both sides are perfectly aligned during exposure, which can be achieved by building a kind of bag from the transparency foils with transparent tape.

After exposure the pre-sensitized PCB is put into the etching tank until all the exposed parts are etched away while the shiny copper of the designed paths stays. When you can see light shining through from behind, you know that your board etched enough. We choose a quite thin board which we cut into shape after the etching process with a pair of scissors. The remaining photoresist layer needs to be wiped off with acetone in the end to make better soldering connections possible. Then the holes to connect both sides of the board need to be drilled and the PCB is ready for the electronic parts.

In order to reduce size and weight of the robot as much as possible we decided to become as small as possible and to use SMD (Surface Mount Device) parts. These are so tiny that it is difficult to solder them onto the board manually. That for we build a temperature controlled SMD reflow oven, which melts the parts onto the board for you instead. 🙂

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Robot Psychology, Software, Studio |

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Robertinas first steps towards Empahty!

Currently we are working on making our Robot Swarm  perceive humans. The vision sense of our robot is a camera; the robot sees its environment, but that alone is not enough. The robot needs to learn to differentiate a bit more.

Previously we used Python and could already detect emotions, but to be more flexible and have the possibility to have more control, we are porting our coding environment to c++.

With the goal to respond to human emotions the primary goal is to detect faces. In order to teach Robertina to identify a human face, we use the computer vision and machine learning libraries OpenCV and dllib.

And see what she can already perceive: That’s Adam and me and she can identify two heads and amazingly also our so called facial landmarks that play a relevant role in her future ability to actually perceive emotions!

 

Empathy Swarm, Inspiration, Prototype, Reference, Robot Psychology |

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It is so human this tiny little triangle: First ideas towards robotic empathy behavior!

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s analog overhead projector animations were already used in 1944 to demonstrate how easy it is for the observer’s brain to associate emotional attachment to inanimate objects and how our human brain is hard wired for compassion.

Empathy Swarm will transplant this from a digital to a physical environment by creating a swarm of robots that as a whole can adapt its behavior and interacts with the observer’s emotional feedback.

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Conference, Empathy Swarm |

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Media Art Worlds, Helsinki: a conference on hybrid economies of digital art

An inspiring and challenging conference in Helsinki asking real questions about the role and future of media art in Europe. Sara Cook gave an impressive overview about the history of media art and the challenges of it.

The conference was also the perfect opportunity to meet-up and discuss with all the EMAP/EMARE artists and organizations and to get to know each other’s projects. For the first time we also met the organizers of our residency from KONTEJNER.

Thanks for fantastic hosting to m-cult!

 

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

(pictures © KONTEJNER)