CMU’s Knight: Art Can Help Create the Future of Robotics

Heather Knight. AUVSI photo.

By Brett Davis



Art can inform science and help create robots that are better at social interaction with humans, roboticist Heather Knight told the crowd at the last day of AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems 2013.



Knight, who is working toward a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, heads the “Marilyn Monrobot” robotic performance project in New York City and organized the annual Robot Film Festival and Cyborg Cabaret.



She said the intersection of art, design and robotics can help lead to robots that work better with people, on the factory floor or in the home.



“Partnering people with machines makes them capable of doing a lot more,” Knight said.



The way people communicate with each other is often the fastest way to communicate with robots, she said. She gave an overview of her career, from robotic flowers to a sensor-equipped bear to Data, a joke-telling robot that is capable of gauging audience response to its quips.



Knight also gave a brief history of robotics, noting that the term itself originates from the world of art, specifically the 1921 Czech play “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”



“Is there something that research can get from entertainment? … The answer is yes,” she said.



She argued this point with Data, a Nao robot from France’s Aldebaran Robotics, where Knight once worked on sensor design. She also showed a short film from the Robot Film Festival about a household robot that doesn’t seem to notice when his owner disappears.



The festival was created to showcase “positive stories about robots,” she said. “The idea is that you can stimulate the future before it is possible. … Science fiction has inspired a lot of innovation.”