Background

For my final performance, I would like to explore trust and cooperation through a series of collaborative balancing and control “games” facilitated through robotic actuators, simulation, or a combination of both.

Every waking moment of our lives, we subconsciously coordinate hundreds of muscles in our body in an orchestra that allows us to walk, run, and play. In highly dynamic team sports, such as basketball or soccer, this is taken a step further, where multiple players “sync up” their bodies into a greater orchestra. I believe this mind-melding phenomenon is why we find it so entertaining and mesmerizing to watch athletes at the highest levels play their sports. The human body is a fantastically complicated machine, with hundreds of degrees of freedom. For my work in this class, I would like to distill this phenomenon down to its most basic level, allowing viewers to control simple, low degree-of-freedom systems.

Performance

I plan to accomplish this through simple demonstrations of control, in which two players (or possibly more, if time/resources permit), each equipped with a force sensor-actuator joystick, work together to control a system. Such systems could be a stick or ball balancing on a board, or an inverted pendulum balancing upright. Each player could control a different degree of freedom, or antagonistically control the same degrees of freedom. As each player pushes on their joystick, they can feel the other player as well as the dynamics of the physical system (real life or simulated) pushing back on them. I believe this force feedback is key to get the kind of mind-meld phenomenon you see in highly dynamic sports.

I expect when two players begin the game, they will struggle to cooperate at first and repeatedly fail. Over time, however, they will learn eachother as well as the game more intimately, and improve over time, just as athletes do.

This ball-balancing example is the simplest sort of game two players could play, but the idea is expandable to different games that require some cooperation to play. Physics simulation offers opportunity to quickly prototype and experiment with different games to see what might work for a physical demonstration. The performance could take place over the internet, with the two identical joysticks in two different parts of the world controlling a shared simulation, or in-person, with the joysticks and game arena all in the same physical room.

Technical Background/Prior Work

Ben Katz (MIT) – Bilateral Teleoperation (3DoF per joystick)

Joey Wood / Lu Li (CMU) – Force-sensor actuator