I have neglected this blog for the last year due to it not being part of the marking scheme on my course for most of my final year modules, I would however like to update it to document the projects I completed in final year as well as current and future projects and work.
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Throughout the year I have worked on a number of projects that have required either separate or group blogs, below are the links to each of these for anyone who is interested!
Documenting City: http://documentingcity.wordpress.com/
Html5 Game Development: http://canvasgamedevelopment.wordpress.com/
Tamar Grow Local Media Elements: http://dat202tgl.wordpress.com/
X06 Phantom Violin Development: http://phantomviolin.wordpress.com/
We have been using arduinos mixed with a breadboard
resistors and other electrical components such as light sensors to
alter the sounds being emitted to a speaker, here are some pictures
from the practical 206 lecture, this is all giving us a bit of
background knowledge before starting the 206 assignment of creating
a musical instrument!
Part of the assignment for 201 is to exhibit our practical projects, the exhibition will take place in the Roland Levinsky Building, in order for our exhibition to be managed and organised I need to present a short brief of what I will need and what space I will need to present my project.
In order to exhibit my work effectively I will require a small amount of floor space as well as a desk/table on which to place a monitor, I will also require access to at least 4 power sockets.
I will use the monitor to display an edited video of footage captured during experimentation with my robot, along with the monitor on the surface space I will have a workbook of how the robot was constructed and its specifications. I will use the floor space to demo the robot working, interacting with passers-by.
Basic sketch of floorplan
In our 206 lecture this week we were playing with arduinos connected to RFID chips and readers, this was very interesting because there are a lot of potential innovative uses for RFID technology.
I find any new technologies very interesting and likewise with RFID, it will be interesting to see what it is used for in the future and to try and think of uses for it within my coursework.
For my DAT201 project my aim is to explore the relationship between robots and humans in order to discover what works and what doesn’t with robot-human interaction and what can be done in the future to improve or change the relationship between humans and robots for the better.
My project will explore the relationship between robotic devices and humans in real life situations and compare these to human-to-human interaction of the same nature. I will create a prototype robot that I will release into a public space (i.e. city center or university campus), the aim of which will be to see what reactions the robot causes when it tries to interact with people, these interactions will vary from asking for directions to complimenting or insulting people. This is in order to judge the subjects response to the robot compared to if asked a similar question by a human. I have also decided to expand this exploration by having changeable aesthetics on the robot, for example one cute and innocent looking casing and one more angry and hardened looking exterior, this is to counteract the research I did that concluded that a ‘cute’ looking robot would be much more approachable than a more industrial or hardened looking one, I need to be able to effectively compare the robot-human interaction with human to human interactions and therefore by varying the aesthetics it will enable me to acquire a more informed answer.
The technology I will use to create this robot could include an Arduino or Rasp PI because of their size, portability and ease of coding; both these devices have proven track records being used for successful robotics applications. I will also incorporate a speaker, microphone and camera into the robot so that it could interact with people and record/stream feeds from the robot to aid in the evaluation of the results. The robot will likely be remotely controlled due to unpredictability of people in public places.
The whole project will be covertly recorded on camera, I will need to also record certain human to human interactions in order to effectively compare the results with the footage recorded of the robot human interactions.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I stopped blogging over Christmas as was busy with other stuff!
This terms modules has a lot of group based projects with project specific blogs for each one. I will post some updates here for them although the majority of the content will be view-able on those blogs. I will add the links to this post shortly.
Coming up this term I have:
- DAT201 – Essay and Practical Project – I will blog about this soon as I will be putting the practical project into development soon!
- DAT202 – Tamar Grow Local Innovative Idea – Coming up with a way to digitally enhance the CIC (Community Interest Company) Tamar Grow Local. (Group Project)
- DAT203 – Documenting Cities – A very wide briefed project concerning the city of plymouth, an explanation will be on the blog. (Group Project)
- DAT204 – HTML5 Web Game – We have been tasked with the job of creating an HTML5 game that can implement Canvas, SVG and WebGL. (Group Project)
- DAT205 – App Development – I have not yet received the brief for the assignment for this module however we are currently learning android app development.
- DAT206 – Arduino – Although the final brief hasn’t been given to us we will be creating a musical device/instrument using Arduino and Processing. (Group Project)
So leading on from the essay I wrote I have been researching into what makes robots approachable and what makes somebody want to actively interact with a robot successfully!
Having a looked around for a few projects similar to the ones I am planning, I found this :
The above robot relies on being cute for people to interact with it, so after digging a little deeper into what people find cute and why we find specific things cute, I found the video below which I think sums it up pretty well!
Having blogged about my website as it developed I forgot to blog about the semantic app concept I came up with!
Here is a mockup of the app:
semantic
The idea uses multiple social networks and social media platforms to aggregate the locations of your friends using a mixture of geolocation and other location technologies.
The application would use platforms such as Facebook, twitter and Instagram to gain the locations of your friends!
The reason this is not possible now is that it is currently not possible to aggregate the data needed using semantic coding, this is due to the individual platforms not being coded in a way that conforms to the new semantic web coding conventions.
My website is now live!
willpanchaud.com (Best viewed in latest version of Chrome)
since uploading I have however noticed a few issues still occurring in any other browsers other than google Chrome. Generally I have had good feedback about the design and navigation of the site though which is good!
