Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots

Demers, Louis-Philippe; Hořáková, Jana

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-79486-8_34

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…As noted in Demers and Horakova (2008), puppets and robot performers are both inert entities called on to perform in front of an audience. However, we believe that this distinction is insignificant for this article as the purpose of the reported research is to better understand affect and expressiveness as the first step towards capturing it with autonomous behaviors.…”

Section: Previous and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

et al. 2010

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Seven flying robot "fairies" joined human actors in the Texas A&M production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating believable agents that will transfer to robots. Second, the theater is a natural testbed for evaluating the response of untrained human groups (both actors and the audience) to robots interacting with humans in shared spaces, i.e., were believable agents created? The production used two types of unmanned aerial vehicles, an AirRobot 100-b quadrotor platform about the size of a large pizza pan, and six E-flite Blade MCX palm-sized toy helicopters. The robots were used as alter egos for fairies in the play; the robots did not replace any actors, instead they were paired with them. The insertion of robots into the production was not widely advertised so the audience was the typical theatergoing demographic, not one consisting of people solely interested technology. The use of radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles provides insights into what types of autonomy are needed to create appropriate affective interactions with untrained human groups. The observations from the four weeks of practice and eight performances contribute (1) a taxonomy and methods for creating affect exchanges between robots and untrained human groups, (2) the importance of improvisation within robot theater, (3) insights into how untrained human groups form expectations about robots, and (4) awareness of the importance of safety and reliability as a design constraint for public engagement with robot platforms. The taxonomy captures that apparent affect can be created without explicit affective behaviors by the robot, but requires talented actors to convey the situation or express reactions. The audience's response to robot crashes was a function of whether they had the opportunity to observe how the actors reacted to robot crashes on stage, suggesting that pre-existing expectations must be taken into account in the design of autonomy. Furthermore, it appears that the public expect robots to be more reliable (an expectation of consumer product hardening) and safe (an expectation from product liability) than the current capabilities and this may be a major challenge or even legal barrier for introducing robots into shared public spaces. These contributions are expected to inform design strategies for increasing public engagement with robot platforms through affect, and shows the value of arts-based approaches to public encounters with robots both for generating design strategies and for evaluation.

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Section: Previous and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…or "those two robots are above the action, they all must be watching the action"). Demers and Horakova (2008) refer to animacy in performing robots as anthropopathy, a term from theater denoting the attribution of affect to non-human beings.…”

Section: Apparent Affect From Animacy (The Heider-simmel Effect)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

et al. 2010

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“…Kinetic art, with its focus on movement perception and context as means of creating sense of the work of art, highly influenced robotic art (Demers & Horakova, 2008;Kac, 1997). The way in which the robot, through its engagement with the space and the people around it, evoked certain concepts and affects, became therefore the focus of such projects.…”

Section: Affective Movement In Robotic Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Movement in Robotic Art: Alternatives to the ‘Interiority Paradigm’ in Social Robotics

Troughton

2022

Body, Space &Amp; Technology

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This papercritically evaluates how emotional and intentional movement is conceptualisedand deployed in social robotics and provides an alternative by analysingcontemporary robotic artworks that deal with affective human-robot interaction(HRI). Within HRI, movement as a way of communicating emotions and intent hasbecome a topic of increased interest, which has made social robotics turn totheatre and dance due to the expertise of these fields in expressive movement.This paper will argue that social robotics’ way of using performative methodswith regards to emotional movement is, nonetheless, limited and carries certainchallenges.  These challenges aregrounded on the claim that social robotics participates in what the authorcalls an ‘interiority paradigm’. That is, movement is understood to be theexpression of inner, pre-determined states. The 'interiority paradigm' poses several challenges to the development of emotional movement, with regards to unaddressed human androbotic imaginaries, an emphasis in legibility and familiarity, and arestrictive interior/exterior binary that limits the role of movement in anaffective connection. As an example of how robotscould be imagined beyond this interiority paradigm, the author proposes to turnto contemporary robotic art.Robotic art’s view on affective movement as a matter of evocationand of performative co-creation might inspire the development of robots thatmove beyond the requirement of being mere copies of a human interiority.  While the intersection between robotics andthe performing arts is a fruitful field of research, the author argues in thispaper that the way in which movement is currently being developed throughperformative methods has certain shortcomings, and that the perspective of roboticart on affective movement might open up a more interesting area of explorationfor social robotics, as well as expose those aspects of theatre and dance thathave being unaddressed in robotics. 

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“…In this work, we put robots on stage. This has already been done in various art performances, including live theatrical shows [10], [11], and it traces back to the eighteenth century with the appearance of mechanical automata [12], [13]. In our work, we employ the Kilobot robots [14] as actors.…”

Section: Kilobot Robots On Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The acting performance of a human actor is much richer and more complex than our programmed robots, however we believe it could still represent a much simpler form of acting. Considering robots as art performers is a recent trend that is gaining attention [9], [10] and we believe that it is a promising direction both for engineering and art.…”

Section: Kilobot Robots On Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Robots as Actors in a Film: No War, A Robot Story

Reina,

Ioannou,

Chen

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Will the Third World War be fought by robots? This short film is a light-hearted comedy that aims to trigger an interesting discussion and reflexion on the terrifying killerrobot stories that increasingly fill us with dread when we read the news headlines. The fictional scenario takes inspiration from current scientific research and describes a future where robots are asked by humans to join the war. Robots are divided, sparking protests in robot society... will robots join the conflict or will they refuse to be employed in human warfare? Food for thought for engineers, roboticists and anyone imagining what the upcoming robot revolution could look like. We let robots pop on camera to tell a story, taking on the role of actors playing in the film, instructed through code on how to "act" for each scene.

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Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

Affective Movement in Robotic Art: Alternatives to the ‘Interiority Paradigm’ in Social Robotics

Robots as Actors in a Film: No War, A Robot Story

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