Creative Robotics

The Performative Body-Mapping (PBM) method develops a novel approach to designing social, non-humanlike robots, which tackles the ‘correspondence problem’ in demonstration learning by harnessing dancers’ movement expertise and taking advantage of their ability to embody unfamiliar forms. Motion capture of performers inhabiting costumes that resemble robots provides the necessary data to bootstrap a machine learning process, allowing non-humanlike robots to learn how to move in ways that are readable to humans. Current research is exploring the combination of movement models learned using PBM with intrinsically motivated machine learning to support the improvisation of human readable movements, expanding the expressive range of non- anthropomorphic social robots.

Publications

This paper explores the social capacity of robots as an emergent phenomenon of the exchange between humans and robots, rather than an …

Performative Body Mapping is a method for harnessing the embodied expertise of dancers to inform the design, movement and behaviour of …

This paper investigates how a non-humanlike, abstract robot can develop a social presence based on its capacity to move in delicate and …

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of skill acquisition for creative robotics, where the required knowledge is highly …

This paper explores movement and its capacity for meaningmaking and eliciting affect in human-robot interaction. Bringing together …

As a triennial, international new media art exhibition is a brand academic program of National Art Museum of China, providing a …

The invention of machine performers has a long tradition as a method of philosophically probing the nature of creativity. Robotic art …

This paper explores new forms of entanglement between human and nonhuman agents. In considering the performative potential of …

One of the most curious characteristics of computing processes and the medium of the digital is that they evoke, reinforce, produce and …

Starting from the premise that our idea of machines has expanded from questions of instrumentality to “a discourse of machine as acting …

This article explores the production of ON TRACK, a performative installation, whose slippery, smelly narrative emerges from the …