ctrl.altered.mind

I stumbled upon a video demonstration of PICO, a project that serves as a strong precursor to indicate the future of automaton interaction, based on the influence of computational/physical optimization.

PICO stands for Physical Intervention in Computational Optimization and is a project by James Patten, an MIT graduate whose biography describes him as a creator of interactive works in diverse media.

Objects placed on the Pico table, as demonstrated in the video, are controlled via software and electromagnetics, implying that client objects under control within the defined space are passive, but building an additional layer of intelligence into the objects themselves would provide an extra dimension of laws for the interaction amongst the objects in the given spatial dimensions.

While PICO provides an excellent automation framework for applications such as factory floor plan layouts and CNC toolpath optimization, it would be an interesting framework to apply towards social interaction for distributed robotics.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Robotics.