#Day #3
Today was a busy day, we made our first sound trials with Jean-Marc Weber, both with the dancer (Marie-Aline) and Poppy:
Jean-Marc creates sounds from video inputs. He uses camera and kinect to detect people in a room or motion of their skeleton. Based on that input, he associates some sounds or some effects on particular motion or space positions. To avoid brouhaha that could be created by excessive mixing of sounds, he has developed a probabilistic composer which can mix input information to play several kind of music.
###Here you can have a small preview:
The movement are just played from a physical demonstration I made before, it works really well but when I saw this first attempt, I immediately thought it would be great to let the robot explore by curiosity the sounds it can produce. I discussed with Jean-Marc about this idea and if some of you want to participate to this residency and are interested, we still have time to do it until tuesday! It would be way more interesting for the Flowers Team to show our curiosity driven exploration algorithms and this experiment is a great application of our work.
###Beta test note:
Also, the strong interaction between Poppy and the dancer showed it was really complicated, when the robot is compliant, to avoid motors to go on their dead-band. In addition, wires tend to tangling around motors, which eventually unplug some…
To try to avoid this, I worked on a new primitive I called SmartCompliant which let motors compliant but turn them rigid when approaching the limits. It is working quite well, yet it is a bit complicated to tune correctly to have a really smooth behaviour. Promising but it needs further work to reach a satisfying behaviour. If you want to contribute to the code (still at the prototype stage), here is the associated commit:
https://github.com/poppy-project/poppy-software/commit/500954737bb557ec06f41ca3c7f3d2f0154c327f
I also took notes of a lot of small improvements that would make the use and understanding of the robot much easier by artists. I will take time after the residency to list and explain them.