INTRO:

I am interested in the competitive nature of robot interaction. I like the idea of pitting two robots against each other, and seeing how they try to fight each other, while also trying to maintain their own safety. This performace will incorporate ideas such as: fighting as a form of entertainment, the duality between risk-taking and cautiousness, and the beauty of balancing.

IDEA:

In order to portray these ideas, I want to create two robots who are balancing either on one or two wheels, and have an “arm” that is used to try to push the other robot over.

I think creating the robots will be much easier with two wheels, from a technical standpoint. If given enough time, or perhaps if the final project is virtual and not in-person, maybe I will try to create robots with only one leg to stand on. I think that would make balancing even more difficult, heightening the risk of each “push”.

When Robot A tries to push Robot B, Robot A will experience a reaction force that causes it to be pushed back, so this will cause the robots to have to consider their own safety when lunging in for a push. So this will create an internal conflict for the robots that I think will make for a very interesting performance.

PERFORMANCE:

I think that for the performance, if the robots were programmed to be too cautious (not push super hard in order to maintain balance) the performance would be boring. So I think it will be important to program the robots to be more risk-taking than cautious.

I think a lot of the programming should be spent on creating robots with really good balance. Good balance will give the robots more confidence, allowing them to take bigger risks with more forceful pushes.

The performance will start with the robots set up relatively far from each other, then they drive toward each other and begin attacking. I think this could be a very interesting performance as long as each robot survives a few pushes. If it ends too quickly, I think that the ideas behind the performance won’t reach the audience as well.

I also think the audience will be well engaged as members of the audience will probably end up picking a robot that they want to win or think will win, and then get to watch to see if their prediction was correct.

VARIATIONS:

David and Goliath: In order to create a more interesting narrative, we can make the robots non-identical and see how that affects the fight, as well as the audience’s perceptions and predictions of the outcome of the fight.

One-Wheel vs Two Wheel: Again playing with non-identical robots and seeing the fight between the two. One would have an easier time balancing, so it might be more of a risk taker, whereas the other doesn’t have the same balance, so it has to be more cautious.