Bay Area Group Building Dancing Robot

Aug. 19, 2007 -- The Burning Man festival is only one week away, and, in warehouses throughout the Bay Area, artists are rushing to finish performance projects in time for the annual desert event. One of those groups is building a GPS ballet.

This is a robot. Well, actually, a roll bot. It doesn't even have wheels. It just sort of rolls along. But, then, it's not supposed to do much. This robot was born to dance.

Michael Prados of the Swarmbot Project: "I think a lot of it came from brainstorming about kinetic art. And a lot of the discussion has centered around dance as an inspiration. And, so, by thinking about dancers and the way they move, we started to think about how we could have machines that had some of those same aspects."

Look closely at the bottom of the sphere, and you will see something swinging back and forth. That's a very heavy battery. By shifting it backward or forward like a pendulum, you can force the cage to roll backward or forward, even change direction. On top is a black radome connected to an inexpensive wireless network called Zigbee, connected to a laptop, which is connected to a common videogame controller. But wait. There's more.

Michael Prados, Lee Sonko, and a small team developed this for the art festival in the desert, Burning Man 2007. They are busy fashioning aluminum ribs and electronics for 5 more robots, which will all become dance partners. The black dome atop the robot contains a GPS unit in addition to wi-fi.

So, a half-dozen robots will be able to synchronize their own dance without needing the remote control. At least, that's the plan.

Michael Prados: "We hope we can impart at least some small bit of it, and surprise and delight people with a new kind of machine behavior."

Burning Man officially kicks off on August 27, 2007.

------- Links -------

The Swarmbots project is funded by
The Black Rock Arts Foundation, a part of Burning Man.
www.blackrockarts.org

Home of the SWARM Robots www.orbswarm.com

SWARM Blog blog.orbswarm.com

SWARM Wiki http://wiki.orbswarm.com

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