Week 09: Practical Project (Material Sourcing and Design)

After discussing with the team, we all agreed on a range of sizes for the maquette of the enclosure. The final dimensions would all depend of the acrylic we would be able to source.

A1 size: 594 x 841 mm base x 150 or 200 mm height

A2: 420 x 594 mm base x 150 or 200 mm height

A3: 297 x 420 mm base x 150 or 200 mm height

Tanya's sketch of the enclosure

For the look of the enclosure, Puneet Sharma suggested that it look something like this aquarium by Reef Builders:

The edges at the top would be serrated to resemble waves. These edges would also catch the light from the LEDs at the base of the enclosure.

The enclosure was to have a “false base” which would serve as the area where the bots would move. Below this base would be populated by acrylic corals and sea animals. The corals could have an etched appearance (we couldn’t do actual etching as per the lecturer’s advise because it would have taken way too long to create). In order to have an etched appearance, the workaround would be to adjust the focus and power of the beam.

Illustration I did on Adobe Illustrator

The Empathy Swarm

During one of our sessions, Tanya Menadue brought up something somewhat related to our project, the “Empathy Swarm” exhibition at QUT. The exhibition, created by Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan, investigated the idea of robot empathy.”Can robots feel?” was the question that drove the show. According to the exhibition notes on the website, the piece was:

…the culmination of an extensive research project experimenting with human-robot social interaction. Using emotion recognition algorithms and camera tracking, a swarm of 50 robots adapts its behaviour and interacts with the observer. Its formations, animations and behaviour become the vocabulary of swarm expression. Visitors to the exhibition will experience the swarm of a fluid robot formation and discover how machines derive compassionate responses to humans.

I visited the exhibition myself but unfortunately, the bots were on “break” as I had arrived past their operational hours. It was interesting to note how the exhibition show a human, “emotional” side to bots and how each run of the bots in action showed truly unique bot behaviour.

Sourcing Second-hand Acrylic

We wanted to fully live-out our concept of reducing plastic consumption so we sourced our first batch of acrylic sheets from Reverse Garbage, which according to their website is a“not-for-profit worker run co-operative that promotes environmental sustainability and resource reuse.” One of the team members, Jennie Franklin, and I went there to see if we could find any used acrylic sheets. All we could find were some old acrylic frames (intended for posters). They were quite scratched and cost more than we had expected but we decided to purchase them anyway. We planned to have the sheet cut on the laser cutter on campus since the sheets were actually two sheets fused at one end. Tanya Menadue also set out to find acrylic at a Tip Shop in Geebung but unfortunately, the only thing that was available was a small acrylic fish tank, way too small for our enclosure.

The next step was to get the sheets cut at the workshop then design, construct, and prototype the enclosure.