Overview

This is the course guide for Robotics for Creative Practice, cross-listed as 16-375 and 54-375. This collaborative course brings art and engineering together into making performance machines which are surprisingly animate. It explores interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of drama, music, and robotics. Students develop group projects culminating in a public performance. Within this process the top-level objective is a reflection on the nature and process of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Fall 2025 News

For Fall 2025, the course will meet at noon-1:50PM Tuesday and Thursday in the IDeATe Physical Computing Lab, Hunt A10, on the library lower level.

The curriculum for this course constantly evolves. For Fall 2025 we will focus on the hidden agency implicit in human-robot interaction. We will both make simple robotic interaction devices from scratch and program robots at the AI Makerspace. Our designs will evolve through role play, prototypes, and field tests, culminating in a final demo.

Within this investigation we’ll explore the key principles of this course: an exploration of embodied behavior as a creative medium, and collaborative development of systems for storytelling and human interaction.

Contents

• Daily Agenda Logbook
• Syllabus: Robotics for Creative Practice
• Assignments
• Webots Robot Simulator Examples
• Sample Code
• Hardware
• Lab Resources
• Videos of Related Work
• Non-Glossary
• Bibliography

• File Archives

  • zip files for downloading technical resources

  • Webots sources (browsable)

  • Python sources (browsable)

  • SolidWorks CAD files for reference machine designs

  • Arduino sources (browsable)

For reference: Search Page and Index

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Robotics for Creative Practice Fall 2025 Course Guide by Garth Zeglin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.