Robots stir visions of ceaseless motion. The study of their movement is a key to the expressivity they project, a language bound to their unique forms and limitations. To grasp this nuanced communication, to choreograph movements both clear and compelling, engineers and artists must forge a shared understanding. Whether in solitude or synchronized groups, robotic expressivity lies in the artistry of motion, a collaboration born of both form and function.
Call for Extended Abstracts/ Short Papers
Important Dates:
- Abstracts (2 to 4 pgs): April 26th 2024 May 5th 2024 (extended)
- Submissions will be evaluated as they arrive and acceptance will be provided as soon as possible up to May 7th 2024.
- Tutorial date: May 17th 2024
Short papers/extended abstracts are invited to be presented at a special poster/interactive session as part of the tutorial program. Submissions should be related to the tutorial topic and should represent work relevant to robotic and dance. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and accepted abstracts/short papers will be archived on roboticart.org with the possibility of being invited to publish extended work in a special issue in a suitable journal.
Topics include (non-exhaustive):
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Human-Robot Interaction
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Robot motion planning
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Path planning
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Human-centred manipulation and navigation
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Collaborative robotics
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Human/Robot performances
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Natural movements in robots
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Robot Swarms
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Human motion tracking and analysis
Introduction
In the world of robotics, the future undeniably lies in the swarm. Inspired by the intricate harmonies of nature, robotic swarms stand to reshape industries. Yet, a shared challenge emerges: how to make swarm behavior legible, whether inspired by nature or engineered for specific tasks. Operators must grasp a swarm’s actions for rapid decision-making, while everyday users in social settings need to intuitively understand a swarm’s intent.
The Choreographic Swarm tutorial tackles this with hands-on sessions, keynotes, and talks from both artistic and technical roboticists. The focus extends beyond mastery to creative collaboration and mentorship. Artists and engineers will forge a shared understanding, envisioning the next generation of robots and robot swarms that blend expressivity with purpose.
Keynotes
Breathless: Catie and the Robot (an eight-hour modern dance homage to physical labor
Catie Cuan & Ken Goldberg
This durational duet created by dancer/choreographer/engineer Catie Cuan and artist/researcher Ken Goldberg pairs Catie with an industrial robot arm for an eight-hour dance performance that unfolds over the timespan of an American workday. With music including original compositions by Peet van Street, the performance will contrast the beauty, strength, and frailty of the human body with the precision of machinery. After, Cuan and Goldberg joined NS+ Curator Elena Park for conversation and audience Q&A.
From Swarms to Multiple Robots: Methods and Good Practices for Real-World Applications
Alcherio Martinoli
Technological advances in communication, embedded computing, energy storage, sensors and actuators enable an increasingly higher number of potential applications for swarm robotics. Design principles proposed by swarm robotics are supposed to become competitive when the number of robotic nodes is large and their resources are severely constrained by cost, volume, or mass considerations imposed by the targeted application. Such constraints result in an increased stochasticity of the node behavior that has to be controlled with appropriate methods, typically relying on self-organization principles, in order to obtain a more predictable collective behavior of the system. However, as a matter of fact, real-world applications might require the deployment of multiple robots but not necessarily of swarms, and the individual robotic nodes might be more powerful, and therefore more deterministically controllable, than those typically considered in swarm robotics. Thus, it is important to choose model-based and/or data-driven methods which are well-suited for the targeted physical hardware of the robots, the operational environment, and the mission constraints. In this seminar, I will illustrate, with the help of a few examples, methods and good practices we have learned over the years to tackle problems in the physical reality with multiple robots.
Biographies
An engineer, researcher, and artist, Dr. Catie Cuan is a pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics’ and works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art. She is currently a Postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University. Catie recently defended her PhD in robotics via the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford, where she also completed a Master’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering. The title of her PhD thesis is “Compelling Robot Behaviors through Supervised Learning and Choreorobotics”, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University. During her PhD, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google (now a part of Google Deepmind). She has held artistic residencies at the Smithsonian, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, and ThoughtWorks Arts. Catie is a prolific robot choreographer, having created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Catie is also a 2023 International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures and the former co-founder of caali, an embodied media company.
Ken Goldberg has been interested in robots, rockets, and rebels since he was a kid. He’s skeptical about claims that humans are on the verge of being replaced by Superintelligent machines yet optimistic about the potential of technology to improve the human condition. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithm for part feeding and the first robot on the Internet. In 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship and in 2005 was elected IEEE Fellow: “For contributions to networked telerobotics and geometric algorithms for automation.”
Ken founded UC Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture public lecture series in 1997 serves on the Advisory Board of the RoboGlobal Exchange Traded Fund. Ken is Chief Scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics and on the Editorial Board of the journal Science Robotics. He served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department and co-founded the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Short documentary films he co-wrote were selected for Sundance and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.
Alcherio Martinoli has a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He is currently an Associate Professor at EPFL, leading the Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory. Before joining EPFL he carried out research activities at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the ETHZ, at the Institute of Industrial Automation of the Spanish Research Council in Madrid, Spain, and at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A. His research interests focus on model-based and data-driven methods to design, control, and optimize physically distributed systems, including multi-robot systems, sensor and actuator networks, and intelligent vehicles. Up to date, he has supervised more than 30 PhD students and co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.
Program
8:15 |
WELCOME |
David St-Onge |
8:30 |
KEYNOTE 1: Breathless: Catie and the Robot (an eight-hour modern dance homage to physical labor)This is a special joint presentation with the workshop on “Speed-dating to long-term relationships“: a paired Talk between an Artist and a Roboticist. |
Catie Cuan and Ken Goldberg |
9:15 |
Designing robot expressivity: Human-Robot Experience (HRX) |
Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders |
9:30 |
Designing robot expressivity: Algorithmic Expressivity |
Damith Herath |
9:40 |
Designing robot expressivity: DESSAIM |
David St-Onge and Hélène Duval |
9:50 |
Playful and intuitive motion design tools – RC |
Audrey Rochette and Alexandra Mercader |
10:00 |
Coffee break |
Play with the arms! |
10:30 |
Motion analysis and editing tools |
Audrey Rochette, Hélène Duval, Alexandra Mercader, Elisabetta Zibetti and Florent Levillain |
11:00 |
INTERACTIVE 1: Design motion for Gen3 lite arm. |
Participants (Instructions) |
12:30 |
Lunch |
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13:15 |
KEYNOTE 2: From Swarms to Multiple Robots: Methods and Good Practices for Real-World Applications |
Alcherio Martinoli |
14:00 |
Programming swarms and behaviour composition |
Giovanni Beltrame and Ali Imran |
14:25 |
Swarm-GPT: Combining Large Language Models with Safe Swarm Motion Planning for Deployable Robot Choreography |
SiQi Zhou and Angela Schoellig |
14:30 |
Coffee break |
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15:00 |
Designing group expressivity |
Audrey Rochette, Hélène Duval, Ali Imran, Elisabetta Zibetti and Florent Levillain |
15:15 |
INTERACTIVE 2: Designing emergent swarm choreography for 10 Gen3lite |
Participants (Instructions) |
16:45 |
Group discussion and individual surveys |
Participants + organisers + speakers |
17:15 |
Closing remarks |
David St-Onge |
Organisers
David St-Onge, Director of INIT Robots and Associate Professor at École de technologie supérieure, 1100 Notre-Dame W., Montreal, Canada, [email protected].
Hélène Duval, Adjunct professor at the Dance department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, 840 Cherrier St., Montréal, Canada, [email protected].
Petra Gemeinboeck, Associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, [email protected].
Damith Herath, Associate professor at the University of Canberra, [email protected].
Giovanni Beltrame, Director of MIST and Professor at Polytechnique Montréal, 100 Polytechnique R., Montréal, Canada, [email protected].
Rob Saunders, Associate Professor in Computational Creativity at Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, The Netherlands, [email protected].
Florent Levillain, Adjunct Professor at Université de Technologie de Compiegne, Roger Couttolenc St., 60200 Compiegne, France, [email protected]
Audrey Rochette, Master student at the Dance department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, 840 Cherrier St., Montréal, Canada, [email protected].
Alexandra Mercader, Post-doctoral fellow at INIT Robots, École de technologie supérieure, 1100 Notre-Dame W., Montreal, Canada, [email protected].
Ali Imran, PhD at INIT Robots, École de technologie supérieure, 1100 Notre-Dame W., Montreal, Canada, [email protected].
Elisabetta ZIBETTI
Assistant Professor at CHArt Laboratory ( Human and Artificial Cognition Lab) Paris 8 University, France.