Madeline Gannon

Madeline Gannon sees robots as creatures, not things. Her work blends art, design, and robotics to invent new ways to connect with autonomous machines. Her latest performance, Other Natures, transforms 50 tonnes of industrial automation into a tamed troupe of mechanical creatures. They watch as she moves around their territory, looking for gestures and cues on how to behave. This balance between autonomy and control foreshadows the near-future realities of coexisting with intelligent robots.

The Experience

Credit: © NCCR Digital Fabrication, 2022

Other Natures

2022

A live performance features body-tracking depth sensors and four standard ABB IRB4600-40/2.55 industrial robot arms suspended upside-down from a 50-tonne Güdel gantry robot system.

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Madeline Gannon’s Other Natures project was done while she was in residency at NCCR (National Centre of Competence in Research) at ETH Zurich.

The Process

Accurate, real-time simulation and control were the essential enabling technology for this performance. Dr. Gannon used NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim™ as the main development environment, which provided a physically accurate simulation, obstacle avoidance, and IK solutions for this complex environment

Credit: © NCCR Digital Fabrication, 2022

Dr. Gannon’s body and gestures were tracked using AI and depth sensors as she moved around the robots. The robots were trained to understand primal gestures, such as clapping, waving, and other hand signals, which influenced their behaviors.

Credit: © NCCR Digital Fabrication, 2022

The simulation environment in Omniverse Isaac Sim was so accurate, Dr. Gannon could reuse the depth sensors tracking her body as touch sensors to detect contact with the robots.

Photo: Jay Adams

About Madeline Gannon

Dr. Madeline Gannon is a multidisciplinary designer inventing better ways to communicate with machines. Her research studio, ATONATON, blends art and technology to forge new futures in human-robot relations. Gannon holds a Ph.D in Computational Design from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master's of Architecture from Florida International University. She is a World Economic Forum Cultural Leader and a Research Fellow at both the Carnegie Mellon Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Robotics Fabrication Lab at Florida International University.

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Featured Sessions

Developing, Training, and Testing AI-based Robots in Simulation

We'll cover the latest features of Isaac Sim 2022.1.2 and demonstrate how to build simulation workflows centered around manipulation, navigation, and synthetic data generation. We'll feature several examples of Isaac ROS gait-enhancing and motivating systems working in a simulation.

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Human-Centered Interfaces for Autonomous Machines

We'll share our recent research developing human-centered interfaces for fabrication machines. We will explain how to deploy empathic interfaces that harness a robot's body language for legible, low-level communication with non-experts. This work illustrates how human-centered design can reconfigure automation tool to enhance, augment, and expand human capabilities rather than replace them. We'll also discuss a series of computational techniques for transforming giant, industrial robots into living, breathing mechanical creatures.

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