We’ve moved on from biological form to biosemiotics, which can be simply defined as the study of signs and codes in the biological realm. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on biosensing projects, with the class divided into groups of three. I’ve decided to write down some of my groups initial project ideas, just because putting things in words helps me to think through the different components of a project. Ultimately, we’ll pursue one or two of these ideas in our project, but I anticipate that our idea will pivot along the way as we encounter new inspiration or find that certain aspects are difficult to execute.
Project Ideas:
- Playing off the idea of a robot powered by sun that constantly searches for the sun, try to create a robot that has some sort of biological sensing capacity and acts in a “biological” way. That is, you are not telling it what to do, it is doing what it needs to do to survive. This requires it to sense its environment (either send or receive signals of some sort) and react accordingly.
- Working with hexbots linked to a brain or muscle input, we can create certain thresholds that correspond to actions (i.e., over time, if the brain input is above some level, that corresponds to movement). We also use the infrared sensors on the hexbots to interact with its environment. So, we can put infrared “pillars” in the environment that either attract or repel it (mimicking a food source or a predator), and then we have an interaction between the command signals (which are originating from our brain or muscles) and the environment (which it interacts with in a roughly “biological” way). Our impulses give the command to move or stay still (we can program certain thresholds to command for left or right, etc.), and these movements are placed in the context of the infrared “environment” that we create. This is the “biological robot” aspect of this project, in which it is interacting to its environment.
- We could also create dark and light paths and obstacles on a large sheet of paper, and have the robot sense light vs. dark and be attracted to one. Then, as it is receiving the different inputs and moving around in response to them, it is also responding to its environment, either following or avoiding the light and dark paths and obstacles. We could still keep the metaphor for a biological system, where you make some obstacles represent food or predators.
- Using a headset, record/measure human brainwaves when playing different drumbeats and rhythms. Then, convert this output to movement signals for a hexbot. The hexbot would be fitted with a pen to give a visual display of the brainwave output. I like the broader idea of converting music into a visual output based on human response to it. I’d like to see how different genres of music trigger different responses in the brain, and how those are converted into a visual display (a picture or a video). This doesn’t necessarily need to use a hexbot and pen as the mechanism to convert the brainwave output to a visual output.
- When we get the impulse measurements from our brain or muscles, it will come in as a series of numbers. We can choose to plot these over time, creating a wave form, or we could turn these numbers into some other type of visual output. Theoretically, our muscle or brain responses would differ as we listen to different genres of music, and this would be reflected in the different data and thus different visual output.
I’ll try to update this post as we start our project and alter these original ideas.
guskitchell 