InfoMus Lab
Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale
Robot-human communication in theatre and museums
In our research we experimented the use of semi-autonomous mobile robots capable of navigating in an environment to interact with users (actors, dancers, the public of a theatre, the visitors of a museum exhibition). We used a small, wireless mobile machine "wearing" audio amplifiers, loudspeakers, multimedia equipment and interfaces (some are visible in the figures below). The robots we used are based on the small mobile Pioneer 1 and Pioneer 2 robot platforms developed at Stanford Research Institute and Real Worlds Interfaces, Inc.
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The system at work as a sort of "cicerone" at the Mostra della Cultura Scientifica e Tecnologica Imparagiocando, a Museal Exhibition held in Palazzo Ducale, Genova, March-April 1996. |
The system communicates with users by means of its style of movement, its voice (speech and non-speech audio), the control of multimedia equipment in the environment where the robot acts. Movement attributes and behaviors like "go there" with smooth, nervous, lazy, straight or tail-wagging movements, "follow that moving object", etc. are available at the supervisor software level, to design the robot's storyboard/choreography and personality. Behaviors were developed starting from the Saphira software (SRI), which provides tools for design navigation behaviors. A composer/director can define a choreography, including ways to control system's behaviors, audio and multimedia output. The overall behavior of the system can depend on the interaction with the humans (visitors, actors), and on the current context and history of the performance.
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The mobile platform used in a concert, during the performance of "Spiral", by K.Stockhausen, for trombone and radio. The radio, audio amplifier and loudspeakers are placed on top of the robot navigating on stage, thus creating effects of "physical" spatialization of sound during the performance (trombone Michele Lo Muto, live electronics Giovanni Cospito and Andrea Pennese, Civica Scuola di Musica, Sezione Musica Contemporanea, Milano, June 1996). In this kind of applications the movements of the robot can be influenced by the gestures of the performer. |
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| A robot setup (videocamera, microphone, environmental sensors) at work in our lab on the synthesis of expressive movement: the real-time analysis of the expressiveness in a flute performance influences the style of movement of the robot. |
The systems based on Pioneer 1 and 2 were experimented in public exhibitions ("Salone del Lavoro Ercole", Magazzini del Cotone, Porto Antico, Genova, January 1996; "Mostra della Cultura Scientifica e Tecnologica Imparagiocando", Palazzo Ducale, Genova, March-April 1996), a concert in Milan at the Scuola Civica di Musica, Sezione Musica Contemporanea, and in the multimedia artistic event L'Ala dei Sensi with the dancer Virgilio Sieni.