Partie de chasse
is an interactive installation project that aims to turn an industrial robot arm into
a reactive organism. For this project, we use a Fanuc M16iB industrial robot. An aluminum moosehead is installed at the tip of the robot arm and moves towards the viewers nearby. In order to detect the
presence of viewers in the surrounding space, we use a microphone
array system (ManyEars) and an elaborate
set of sensors. (For security reasons, viewers
are kept at some distance.) When a viewer talks, the microphone array detects the position of the sound source in the room and the robot moosehead moves in its direction. The robot moose also reacts to certain vocal commands, but it is up to the visitors to find out what these are.
The particularity
of this project resides in bypassing the normal programming paradigm of
this type of robot in order to have it execute real-time commands instead of a
predefined sequence of actions. Many artists have used industrial robots
in the past but they have always used them as simple automatons, in a similar
way they are normally used in car factories. Few have ever tried to turn
them into autonomous reactive creatures. With this project, we want to
build a sensitive and responsive machine which is conceptually based
on adaptive and evolutive behaviors.
The ManyEars sound localization system is developed at IntRoLab (University of Sherbrooke). The aluminum moosehead was cast at Replicant Foundry.
