Mike McCracken

With the assignment being to create autonomous art, I wanted to set up a system that would exhibit emergence. I wanted to make a whole bunch of light fearing robots that would become increasingly light adverse the more exposed they were. This would set up a cluster of robots that would churn and move around, as well as congregate around people that would come in to their space and cast a shadow. After it became clear that the cost would be prohibitive, I opted to make a single robot and a simulation of the group.

Here is the robot that I made by lathing aluminum (freehand - with no time for finishing work):

Not shown is its base of two DC motors and a swiveling wheel, and inside were batteries, light sensors (in the holes) and an arduino and h-bridge.

The simulation is available here (pardon the messy auto-generated page). You can pick them up by clicking, or turn off the lights by clicking not on one of them.

It was fun to build and I learned a lot, but the project is admittedly weak on artistic merits. Prof summed it up during the critique with the brutal but fair question, “how is this different from Furby?”. Ouch.

My concept for the next project is better. But you’ll just have to wait.