Leather clad robots will only pogo to punk rock

Davey Winder
Sunday, 06 July 2008 05:58

Science - Biology

A computational neuroscientist and a punk performance artist have built three robots which, courtesy of neural networking and some adaptive resonance theory, have learned to love the musical genre and show their appreciation through the magic of dance...

Over the weekend, a number of musical performances under the banner of 'Neurotic' have taken place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts which proudly proclaim that punk's not dead. Nor, it would seem, is the ability for geeks to do remarkably unusual things. Like create a number of giant pogo dancing robots, for example.

Artist Fiddian Warman has been playing his punk rock record collection to the robots which have been learning to love the music. They have been programmed to become punks, in other words. What's more, during the course of the Neurotic gigs the robots will be given pride of place in the mosh pit and their reactions to live music carefully monitored.

Fiddian is the front man with punk band Neurotic and the PVCs and will be playing tracks written specifically with the robot punks in mind, according to the ICA. The robots themselves are some 2 metres tall and can pogo to a height of 2.3 metres. He also just happens to have been creating robotic and electronic installations for the past 15 years.

Physically speaking, each robot has a base of MDF over a steel frame to form a truncated pyramid. This contains the metre long air muscles, four in all, that help propel the pogoing mechanoids. The muscles have been specially created to provide a natural anthropomorphic feel to the movement, and are claimed to be safer than electric motors or traditional air cylinders.

The Fiddian website explains that "One end of the muscles is anchored to the top of the base the other is fixed to the end of an aluminum tube that forms the robot’s ‘spine’. The tube passes through a bearing that acts as a gimbal thus allowing the robot to be jostled and swayed by the human audience." While the air is controlled by solenoid operated valves, and switched by micro controller boards, it is the interfacing to a neural network that provides the real driving force for this experimental dance performance.

What was the involvement of the computational neuroscientist in all of this, and what can we learn from the experiment? Read on to find out...

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