Empathy with the Machine
I have been exploring some of the issues around human-robot interation with my own work. I was asked to show some hardware hacking at Hackday London (16 June 2007). I decided to look at generating emotions using sound. I bought a slide whistle, also known as a swanee whistle, and motorised it using an old inkjet printer carriage. I programmed an Arduino microcontroller that could position the slide anywhere in its range of motion. I made a pair of bellows out of flexible ducting and motorised them using a car electric window mechanism. I controlled that using a Picaxe microcontroller. By coordinating the bellows and the slide whistle I was able to make it generate pseudo-sentences. By changing some of the variables in the algorithm, it could demonstrate four emotions: neutral, depressed, angry and excited. For the viewers of British TV, it had a lot in common the with language of the Clangers (clip on YouTube). Here’s a movie of it in action, thanks to Craig Smith: