Overview

Please note: this site is from a previous course iteration and is no longer updated.

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.

Contents

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

For reference: Search Page and Index

Course Blog

The RCP project site presents the course project progress.

Syllabus Changes

The syllabus has been provisionally updated for Fall 2020. Some changes of particular note:

• Asynchronous Instruction

• Daily Schedule

• Computing Needs

• Canvas and Piazza

Fall 2020 Pandemic Changes

Fall 2020 brings many changes in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The course meetings will now be entirely remote, using synchronous class time for discussion and interaction and video and readings for asynchronous instruction. The project work will lean more heavily on simulation, with an option for physical prototyping using distributed teams.

The class is formally listed as “IPR” (in-person plus remote) to allow for the possibility that a limited number of students may be able to use the Hunt A5 Fabrication Lab during class time or other scheduled times. This optional access will not be essential for success in the course. The current status of IDeATe facilities can be found on the IDeATe Covid-19 page.

For now, I’d like to re-iterate I intend to maintain the key principles of this course: an exploration of embodied behavior as a creative medium, collaborative development of systems for storytelling and human interaction, and a final show or performance. The specific assignments and project scope will be adapted, but these core goals will be met under whatever conditions we operate.

As a taste of what the course has been like in the past, I invite you to visit the Fall 2019 student projects and course materials.

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Robotics for Creative Practice Fall 2020 Course Guide by Garth Zeglin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.