Project 1 - Working it Out

After our initial decisions we set about trying to make our ideas work, we did some testing with the crayons and immediately found that quite a large amount of pressure was needed to scratch away the crayon effectively, this may have been okay except for the fact we found that readying the surface for the robot to draw was quite labour intensive. This lead us to think about what was going to be a more practical and appropriate way of creating our 2D image and also how we intended to limit the space we were creating our art in.

This takes me back to some research I did on Anthropocentrism, we decided that we wanted to incorporate the theme visually into both the robot and its human built surroundings to show the robots indifference and the human's haste to extract robots from the list of contenders in the art world.

This change of direction steered us away from a series of obstacles and instead into a boxed surrounding, we liked the sense of containment as if quarantined or imprisoned the robot would be shut away, however as it is programmed it will continue to produce its art in accordance with its surroundings.

With our 2D image now needing a media we decided to try out a simple white pen on black paper, I like that the images graduated from a simple pen on paper, in the space above, to moving lights which image is only revealed when photographed with a long exposure.

We constructed a large square enclosure out of cardboard, black paper and framed with wood; instead of obstacles we tried a series of hooks constructed out of fencing wire and secured to the perimeter, this gave the enclosure a tough prison style look which was quite appropriate.

Programming of the robot became our next big task, we had already been trying out builds and modifying our program and had our robot responding to both its ultrasonic and its touch sensors; the next step in development was to build a device that would distribute the wool without pulling or catching overhead of the robot, it had to be capable of of bending to free itself from any existing strands while still being tall enough to ensure the wool hooked at every opportunity.