This year the Department of Computing at Curtin, in association with the Perth Artifactory, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and other international partners, is hosting the 2014 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Response Robotics Summer School and Workshop.

I am presenting tomorrow (Monday 29 September), in a joint session, “Art and Robotics”, with the performance artist Stelarc founder of the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory at Curtin. I hope that our session will invigorate the attendees, who will already have experienced two hours of talks and discussions, and will probably be desperate for lunch!

Stelarc will be presenting first, and will likely provide a provocative view of the possibilities of robotics as explored in his artistic practice, and I’m going to try to work from those ideas back towards response robotics by looking at the various ways that robots can be understood to communicate. I’ll be talking about social robotics from scientific and artistic perspectives, moving from examples such as ASIMO (Honda):

ASIMO 4.28.11

and Kismet (MIT):

Kismet, 1993-2000, view 2 - MIT Museum - DSC03711

via The Fish-Bird Project (CSR):

fish-bird

and AUR (MIT):

AUR Still from Video

to discuss relations with Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots like this Packbot (iRobot) pictured with a soldier:

US Navy 090310-N-7090S-001 Explosive ordnance disposal technicians are using remote-controlled machines to help detect and defuse improvised explosive devices

So, that’s a completely normal presentation trajectory for me, and I’m hoping that it’ll make sense to everyone else!