Principal Investigator Cynthia Breazeal
Project Website http://web.media.mit.edu/~guy/aur/
AUR is a robotic desk lamp: a collaborative lighting assistant that sheds light on the right thing at the right time. It serves as a platform to investigate notions of fluency in joint action, helpfulness, and timing. Through its movement and change of color and light intensity, it is also aimed to evoke a personal relationship with its human partner without resorting to human-like features, encouraging us to rethink the inanimate.
The lamp's design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp's "objectness", I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.
The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring.