2024-02-06 20:00:07
The lights come on, bathing half of the stage in a crimson glow: this is the world of Rojo, a robot that lives between plenitude and abundance. The bright lights go out and give way to a blue gloom that invades the other half of the stage, where Azul, another robot, runs from one side to the other hunting for the few flashes that provide him with enough energy to not die.
You may be interested in: Videos | Is Black Mirror-style life scary? There are already people who dine and walk using Apple’s Vision Pro glasses
This is how Blue and Red begins, a play where the actors are not humans dolled up to look like machines, but robots in every sense of the word, with cables, lights and a programming code as a brain. They debuted in this play as the first actors of the Quyca-Bot project, from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
Although, at first glance, Blue and Red may seem like a simple production in which everything begins with a simple touch of a button, causing the music, lights and robots to unfold in a precise and synchronized act, the reality is far from this apparent simplicity.
The creation of the staging of these tiny robots involved months of hard work, which attracted the most diverse individuals from the faculties of Engineering, Arts and Education, to form a team in which interdisciplinarity was strength.
It all started with the engineer Enrique González; the director of the Department of Education of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Mónica Brijaldo; and the educator Rocío López, who posed a fundamental question: how to bring robots to the classrooms? They began by exploring city simulations where robots performed everyday tasks, such as collecting trash from the streets. While the simulations were interesting, the researchers recognized a much broader potential for robots that transcended the mini-metropolis.
It was then that engineering doctor Ángela Bravo, specialized in dressing robots with emotions and feelings, discovered the acting vocation of these devices.
At that time, the team approached the Faculty of Arts, where professors Víctor Quesada and Alejandro Convers answered the call and embarked on the unusual task of writing and editing professional theater scripts for robots.
“The research project was really figuring out what a professional robotics play meant for a child audience, for educational purposes, was,” Convers says.
“What I thought was: ‘what play is written for a robot theater company?’ This is a commissioned work,” she explains.
That means the Arts team had to carefully study their robot-actors, identify their acting skills, and from there write a script that exploited their full potential, with one small exception: robots didn’t exist yet. “We had the privilege of designing our actors from scratch,” Convers continues.
Although the researchers were free to shape actors and stories as they saw fit, things were far from simple.
“Our first two works were not for Blue and Red yet; They were for some dream robotic assemblies that we believed we could make, but then the reality of the research would make us realize that it was impossible,” confesses the researcher, who decided that the best thing was to make a minimalist gestural work without dialogues.
And making a lot of cables and lights produce a play is not easy at all. Each small action must first be established, so that a programmer can generate the code that, in the end, will give life to the robot: a long and costly process.
Blue and Red, the project’s third script, was built around empathy. Learning from past scripts had resulted in a work that was possible to execute. To do this, Convers and Quesada barricaded themselves in a Javeriana studio, where, together with the staff in charge of lights, programming and music, they made the magic happen.
They were two arduous weeks in the midst of the pandemic, where each occurrence tested the team’s ability to rethink the work.
“Very funny things happened, for example, we discovered that the robots got tired, like actors. As the robot ran out of battery, it moved slower, so the synchronization of music and lighting, which worked very well for us at the beginning of the play, no longer worked so well. We had to adapt,” explains Convers.
The work is imperfect, but it is precisely there where the valuable lessons that its creators tenderly treasure reside. As Convers suggests, Blue and Red is only the beginning, and there are still many creative avenues to explore so that the dramaturgy becomes increasingly clearer.
In the end, this project is tangible proof that, when various disciplines collaborate, they create a rainbow of possibilities that unleash a beauty that is difficult to achieve for each color individually.
Capturing the hearts of those who behold them, these two robots only hint at the vast world of opportunities and applications that robotics offers.
Although we have not yet reached the point of activating a work automatically, it is hopeful to imagine that future research, daughters of the human work that gave birth to Blue and Red, can visit classrooms and serve as support for teaching thousands of children with the push of a button.
Title of the work: Quyca-Bot: creating scripts for dramatisations with robot actors for educational purposes.
Director: Mónica Ilanda Brijaldo Rodríguez
Co-investigators: Víctor Alfonso Quesada Aguilar, Rocío Viviana López Ordosgoitia, Flor Ángela Bravo Sánchez, Enrique González Guerrero, José Alejandro Convers Elías.
Collaborators in the assembly: Carlos Andrés Velásquez Cardona, Gabriel Alberto Díaz Guevara, Jorge Eduardo Canal Corredor, Estefanía Rondón Afanador, Andrés Felipe Botero Castillo, Natalia Chinchilla Castellanos, Miguel Bello.Faculties of Arts, Engineering and Education Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Research period: 2020-2022
#Acting #robots #moving #robotic #work #Javeriana #University