Entertainment Robotics

The demands on entertainment robotics are quite different from those of industrial or research environments. The focus of entertainment robotics is to produce an aesthetically pleasing and believable "agent" with only secondary regard to its performance capabilities. For example, competing with the movie industry's special effects artists, who can achieve incredible on-screen capabilities with a human pulling on bicycle wire, is difficult for a complex research robot that may fail to operate properly when the heat of a sunny day causes a CPU glitch. (Actually experienced during the filming of the Sean Connery movie "Red Sun Rising" using a robot from MIT.)

The Robotic T-Rex employs a novel leg mechanism to reduce the degrees of freedom in the legs (thereby simplifying the design and reducing the probability of failure) yet still producing a rather natural gait.

Robotic Art

Kinetic sculpture and interactive art blend art and engineering to create active works of art that move. It is our goal to create art that is not only active, but responsive.

Below is an interactive sculpture by Aaron Prust, an Art/Computer Science undergraduate student, that contains an artificial creature. The sculpture possesses 5 actuated degrees of freedom including 1 for the motion of the creature, 3 heaters to generate currents in the fluid, and 1 controlling the illumination.

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