FCJ-210 Falling Robots

Abstract

Falling is not usually viewed as a desirable act for humanoid robots, as it can lead to damage and injury of people, things and the robot itself. This article explores how falling can be viewed as an aesthetic, creative act, through positioning it within dance. Strategies for falling safely in dance are compared with engineering approaches to controlling falling for bipedal robots, through the language of automatic reflex, righting reaction and equilibrium response patterns in relation to gravity. By playing with parameters of movement as dancers and choreographers do, the act of falling by robots can go beyond safety-oriented motivations of avoidance and damage mitigation towards expressive behaviours that can be read on multiple levels of meaning for performance, entertainment and non-verbal communication between humans and machines.

Keywords

• robotics
• creative robotics
• dance and robotics
• falling
• bipedal robots