Our Changing Relationship With Robots
By Amy LaViers
A series of interviews of Artists and Speakers featured at the [CODAME](/orgs/codame) [ART+TECH Festival [2018]](/orgs/codame/events/art-tech-festival-2018) by [Irene Malatesta](/artists/irene-malatesta) Alongside a shared love of dance, choreographer/technologist [Catie Cuan](/artists/catie-cuan) and robotics professor [Amy LaViers](/artists/amy-laviers) share an acute interest in the ways that the shifting technological landscape has influenced human behavior and daily interactions. After working together so intensely in recent months, they seem to share a brain when in conversation, often completing each other’s sentences and layering speech to emphasize key ideas. They’ll be bringing their joint performance piece, called [Time to Compile](/orgs/codame/projects/time-to-compile) , to the 2018 CODAME [ART+TECH Festival](/orgs/codame/events/codame-art-tech-festival-2013) in June. They conceived of the project at the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois, as an interactive exploration of our changing relationship to robots, the internet, and to each other. Amy LaViers, a faculty member at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, describes her group, the RAD Lab, as “a heterogeneous all-purpose robotics group, working on everything from hardware, to software, to user studies and modeling humans.” There, her team focuses on quantitative modeling of human movement in an attempt to better understand how natural movement can be incorporated into smarter robotics. While this may sound abstract at first brush, the necessity of integrating qualitative descriptions of human movement, and an understanding of context and culture, into robotics is an increasingly urgent problem. Both Cuan and LaViers are intimately familiar with it, and seeking innovative ways to approach it. Amy LaViers considers her Nao, a humanoid robot. 2013. (Image via GA Tech. Source .) Use cases for the type of research that LaViers currently conducts are multiplying rapidly as we rush to connect and automate more parts of our everyday lives. For example, current RAD Lab projects include work with timing coordination motion of a team of “cooperative robots” in order to effectively aid alternately-abled populations in everyday activities, and a DARPA-sponsored project to design “execution strategies for a suite of movement platforms, allowing nontechnical users to easily prescribe the behavior of a robot.” At AE Machines , the robotics startup that LaViers co-founded and where she serves as Chief Technical Officer, some outcomes of her inquiries are expressed in extremely practical, industrial ways. AE Machines aims to make robotic automation practices accessible to small-batch manufacturers, while designing human/robot interactions that are natural and intuitive for non-technical human operators. LaViers explains, “We created a tool that allows people to design movements graphically and it has a scalable way of installing new pieces of hardware that it supports. It’s all choreography. I see it as very related to the work both inside and outside of the research lab.” Her connection to the industrial world grounds her thinking about the complex relationship that humans have with their robot assistants. That connection has brought her face to face with the often negative reactions that non-technical people have to the idea of working with robots.