EXHIBITION PROPOSAL FOR THE NEW YORK HALL OF SCIENCE

December 2004

Name:
"Robots - Form and Function, Body and Mind"
Scenario:
Robots are to 21st-century children what dinosaurs were for us: an endless source of fascination. But while robots are 'cool' in of themselves, by focusing on their separate components, we can teach numerous aspects of physics and engineering while holding an audience's attention with an engaging context.
Concept:
Every year brings new strides in the development of robotics, but what exactly are robots anyway? And how do they work? This exhibit exposes the inner workings of autonomous mechanical devices from past and present.
By taking advantage of the sense of wonder that visitors will bring with them, we can teach fundamental lessons about science through explorations of how robots function.

The Sony Wonderlab is a very popular exhibition of technology, composed almost entirely of interactive displays. We should be able to generate the same kind of interest and interactivity with a more education-oriented exhibit that still appeals to visitors' sense of wonder.
Scene:
At the center of the room is a showcase of the most modern robots, from Sony's Qrio to Honda's Asimo and Toyota's Partner Robots, which will be performing routines and interacting with visitors.
Around the perimeter are lab benches, where visitors can experiment with different facets of the development of robotics: History, Current Research, Mechanics, Power, and Artificial Intelligence.
User Experience:
As visitors enter the hall, they first encounter the well-lighted showcase, where they spend their first several minutes, once their appetites are whetted, they can proceed to go around to the other stations at their leisure.


Entrance

Online:
There will also be a substantial Web component of the exhibit, with interactive demonstrations of many of the concepts in the exhibits.
Funding and Corporate Participation:
As the exhibit is a promotional opportunity for the companies such as Honda, and Toyota, and others, I expect at least some of the companies would be eager to both donate models for the showcase as well as participate in subsidizing the rest of the exhibit.
Other possible (and local) participants would be Amorphic Robot Works and Honeybee Robotics, both based in New York.

EXHIBITS

CENTER SHOWCASE

The 'wow' part of the exhibition, designed to look good in photographs that appear in promotional materials as well as draw people in from other parts of the museum.
NOTES
The exhibition titled "The Magic of Myth", featuring props and costumes from the Star Wars movies was immensely popular at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2002, and incorporating some of the robots from those movies would surely help draw people to the museum.

CURRENT RESEARCH

For the first time, people can buy robots for use in the home as toys, companions, and labor-saving devices.
This area will include demonstrations of Sony's Aibo, iRobot's vacuum-cleaning Roomba, and the Mark Tilden-designed RoboSapien
An extension of the Center Showcase, this part of the exhibition includes examples of consumer robots, rather than research models.
Robot-builders in the community would also have space to display their current projects (see below).

HISTORY/AUTOMATA

Mechanical automata have been around at least since the 13th century, when Albertus Magnus is believed to have built a mechanical person using levers, pulleys, and gears.
This exhibit will include displays of mechanical automata from the 17th- and 18th- centuries, including works by Jacques de Vaucanson and Japanese Karakuri of the same period The Morris Museum currently has an exhibit exclusively devoted to this subject, and we would ideally be able to draw from their collection.

CONCEPTS and TERMINOLOGY
- Automata, automation, Responsiveness to environment

INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS
Fragile pieces would need to be placed behind glass, but more robust models could be handled, at least by a docent.
Replicas could sell in the gift shop.

MECHANICS AND MOBILITY:


CONCEPTS and TERMINOLOGY
Gears, torque, levers, leverage, pulleys, etc.
INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS
  • Hand-cranked adjustable gears demonstrate high-speed, low-torque vs. low-speed, high-torque
  • Hydraulics demonstration allows users to lift heavy weights by depressing pistons in the liquid chamber.
  • Nitinol wire demo shows how certain alloys contract when heated and can be used as a kind of 'robot muscle'.
  • Summary exhibit shows how these forms of mechanical translation (gears, pulleys, hydraulics, nitinol) are used for robotic mobility
ONLINE
  • Flash game that allows users to build robots out of basic components: motor, gears, wheels or legs, vision system, processor
  • Similar to what's available at howstuffworks.com but more game-oriented.


POWER


CONCEPTS and TERMINOLOGY
  • Differences in electrical output between solar and mechanical power
  • Electron ('fireman's brigade' metaphor)
  • electron, volt, voltage, potential, current, amp, watt, power

INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS
  • Solar panels, mini-windmills, and hand-cranks (and microphones [piezo and membrane]) hooked up to ammeters and voltmeters.
    Users can shade the panels to see the effect on output, blow on the windmills, talk into the microphone, and turn the cranks - and compare the numbers
    All with diagrams and blowouts behind
  • Large, open electrical motor/generator with exposed magnets attached to variable power supply, changing voltage and current to see effect
  • Same with adjustable gears to demonstrate high-speed, low-torque vs. low-speed, high-torque and how that relates to electrical input

ACTIVITY
  • Children can take a penny, a foil gum-wrapper, and a piece of napkin dampened with saliva to make a small working battery - Not powerful enough to power anything, but detectable on voltmeter
    • Comparisons of:
    • Tethered
    • Battery-powered
    • and Solar-powered robots
    Possible showcase for BEAM robots in the style of Mark Tilden's, which are completely autonomous and solar-driven, requiring no central processor.

    ONLINE
    All the above presented in interactive Flash movies like on howthingswork.com


    Parallel vs. Serial connections


    ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

    ACTIVITY
    Robot in cage (size of robosapien) tethered to terminal with window open that allows basic programming (left, right, pick up, drop)
    users input program and run it to try and make robot pick up a ball and put it in a hole
    CONCEPTS and TERMINOLOGY
    • Machine Vision
    • - - Edge Detection
    • - - Object Recognition
    • Language Recognition
    • Chemical Sensing
    • - - Bomb-sniffing
    INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS
    • AI demonstrated with computer screen and chatbot based on ALICE or others, ideally with voice-recognition -> text -> chatbot -> text -> text-to-speech and one of those flash faces that talk
    • Video camera attached to monitor filtered through software that mimics different kinds of machine vision, to simulate how some robots 'see', switching between highly-pixelated mode, edge-detection mode, infra-red
    • Demonstration of mine-clearing robot used by the government
    • Demonstration of rock-sampling robot used on Mars
    ONLINE
    • Online game based on Lisp/Logo, with easy and fun exercises involving simple programs to make robots perfrom functions on the screen.
    • Other examples are 'Rocky's Boots', 'Robot Builder', and 'DroidWorks'

    Community

    Two ways of encouarging repeat visits is to A) have continually-updated content, and B) have clubs make displaying at the museum part of their objective.
    These two tasks can be combined by the exhibition sponsor competitions, both for high school groups (like Dean Kamen's FIRST project) as well as for organizations. These competitions would have regular showings (similar to the ArtBots show), with 'winners' chosen by vistors, and the winning pieces being on extended display.

    Conclusion

    - By exploiting the current and future popularity of robots as objects of wonder as well as robotics as an increasingly popular hobby, we should expect a level of interest in the exhibit.
    - By accepting commercial product placement and products by amateurs, we should be able to minimize the cost of upkeep.
    - By using robots as the sparker of interest and the umbrella subject matter, we should be able to teach real, fundamental science to people of all ages.

    Matt Slaybaugh
    Cabinets of Wonder, NYU ITP