Week3

Week3

As an Electrical Engineering major, my focus is robotics and control, and I’m currently in a robotics research group right now. From learning the history starting from Faraday and my own experience, I can say robotics and art are definitely closely related and facilitate each other.

As the guest speaker Machiko Kusahara commented about Japanese robots, the designing and building of robots contain art. For example, the anime Astro Boy is a humanoid that gives people console after the defeat of WW2. Instead of making completely functional robots such as robot arms, the idea of making humanoid robots is itself an art. As she mentioned, the humanoid robots look more friendly to people so they can be useful in being rescuers during earthquake. 

Also, humanoid robots are becoming entertainment for rich people, which further illustrates the art embedded in robotics. Being a spiritual figure, a friendly rescuer and an entertainer, these various jobs of robots all show they have been artworks created by human beings. Speaking of my own research, we are building a foldable mini helicopter, and we will explore the use of origami in robotics design. The most famous origami design is the magic ball, which is very useful in robotics system as it can build self-foldable robots.

The Prestige is my favorite movie illustrating the relationship between art and robotics. Magic itself is an art, and Christoper Nolan depicted a young man that is too ambitious to seek the help of technology from Tesla and finally went crazy. The young man used the colon machine to make duplicates of himself and killed the clone every time, and finally couldn't tell whether the survived himself is the colonel or the real one. This great movie uses robotics and clone as an object to create this masterpiece.

Undoubtedly, robotics and art facilitate each other in their developments. Each design choice of robots is art; and art gets infinite inspiration from the arrival of robotics.

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