Painted Heart Beats

In this work we present AURA, a framework for synergistic human-artist painting. We developed a robot arm that collaboratively paints with a human artist. The robot has an awareness of the artist's heartbeat through the EmotiBit sensor, which provides the arousal levels of the painter. Given the heartbeat detected, the robot decides to increase proximity to the artist's workspace or retract. If a higher heartbeat is detected, which is associated with increased arousal in human artists, the robot will move away from that area of the canvas. If the artist's heart rate is detected as neutral, indicating the human artist's baseline state, the robot will continue its painting actions across the entire canvas. We also demonstrate and propose alternative robot-artist interactions using natural language and physical touch. This work combines the biometrics of a human artist to inform fluent artistic interactions.

MBot: A Modular Ecosystem for Scalable Robotics Education

The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed to meet the needs of teaching robotics at scale to match the growth of robotics as a field and an academic discipline. Transformative advancements in robot navigation over the past decades have led to a significant demand for skilled roboticists across industry and academia. This demand has sparked a need for robotics courses in higher education, spanning all levels of undergraduate and graduate experiences. Incorporating real robot platforms into such courses and curricula is effective for conveying the unique challenges of programming embodied agents in real-world environments and sparking student interest. However, teaching with real robots remains challenging due to the cost of hardware and the development effort involved in adapting existing hardware for a new course. In this paper, we describe the design and evolution of the MBot platform, and the underlying principals of scalability and flexibility which are keys to its success.