auto-lysis: art, engineering and circulating referents

I present an investigation into the merging of art practice and engineering. The study is conducted from a first-person perspective, in which I attempt to reconcile my engineering and research background with contemporary art. Through the use of an ongoing methodological dialogue, a comprehensive engagement between art practice and engineering results, producing a balanced (non-hierarchical) exchange of ideas. The works of the thesis exhibition blur the distinction between the aesthetic and the technical as well as the natural and the artificial, featuring mimetic-motion cybernetic machines, concept sketches, mathematical derivations, and an array of “workplinths.” Sited in an industrial complex, the installation is itself a gesture of intervention, bringing the domains of art and engineering into close proximity

A Novel Distributed Privacy Paradigm for Visual Sensor Networks Based on Sharing Dynamical Systems

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) provide surveillance images/video which must be protected from eavesdropping and tampering en route to the base station. In the spirit of sensor networks, we propose a novel paradigm for securing privacy and confidentiality in a distributed manner. Our paradigm is based on the control of dynamical systems, which we show is well suited for VSNs due to its low complexity in terms of processing and communication, while achieving robustness to both unintentional noise and intentional attacks as long as a small subset of nodes are affected. We also present a low complexity algorithm called TANGRAM to demonstrate the feasibility of applying our novel paradigm to VSNs. We present and discuss simulation results of TANGRAM

Vector Field Driven Design for Lightweight Signal Processing and Control Schemes for Autonomous Robotic Navigation

We address the problem of realizing lightweight signal processing and control architectures for agents in multirobot systems. Motivated by the promising results of neuromorphic engineering which suggest the efficacy of analog as an implementation substrate for computation, we present the design of an analog-amenable signal processing scheme. We use control and dynamical systems theory both as a description language and as a synthesis toolset to rigorously develop our computational machinery; these mechanisms are mated with structural insights from behavior-based robotics to compose overall algorithmic architectures. Our perspective is that robotic behaviors consist of actions taken by an agent to cause its sensory perception of the environment to evolve in a desired manner. To provide an intuitive aid for designing these behavioral primitives we present a novel visual tool, inspired vector field design, that helps the designer to exploit the dynamics of the environment. We present simulation results and animation videos to demonstrate the signal processing and control architecture in action

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

Seven flying robot “fairies” joined human actors in the Texas A&M production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating believable agents that will transfer to robots. Second, the theater is a natural testbed for evaluating the response of untrained human groups (both actors and the audience) to robots interacting with humans in shared spaces, i.e., were believable agents created? The production used two types of unmanned aerial vehicles, an AirRobot 100-b quadrotor platform about the size of a large pizza pan, and six E-flite Blade MCX palm-sized toy helicopters. The robots were used as alter egos for fairies in the play; the robots did not replace any actors, instead they were paired with them. The insertion of robots into the production was not widely advertised so the audience was the typical theatergoing demographic, not one consisting of people solely interested technology. The use of radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles provides insights into what types of autonomy are needed to create appropriate affective interactions with untrained human groups. The observations from the four weeks of practice and eight performances contribute (1) a taxonomy and methods for creating affect exchanges between robots and untrained human groups, (2) the importance of improvisation within robot theater, (3) insights into how untrained human groups form expectations about robots, and (4) awareness of the importance of safety and reliability as a design constraint for public engagement with robot platforms. The taxonomy captures that apparent affect can be created without explicit affective behaviors by the robot, but requires talented actors to convey the situation or express reactions. The audience’s response to robot crashes was a function of whether they had the opportunity to observe how the actors reacted to robot crashes on stage, suggesting that pre-existing expectations must be taken into account in the design of autonomy. Furthermore, it appears that the public expect robots to be more reliable (an expectation of consumer product hardening) and safe (an expectation from product liability) than the current capabilities and this may be a major challenge or even legal barrier for introducing robots into shared public spaces. These contributions are expected to inform design strategies for increasing public engagement with robot platforms through affect, and shows the value of arts-based approaches to public encounters with robots both for generating design strategies and for evaluation

A Framework for Modeling Cyber-Physical Switching Attacks in Smart Grid

Security issues in cyber-physical systems are of paramount importance due to the often safety- critical nature of its associated applications. A rst step in understanding how to protect such systems requires an understanding of emergent weaknesses, in part, due to the cyber-physical coupling. In this paper, we present a framework that models a class of cyber-physical switching vulnerabilities in smart grid systems. Variable structure system theory is employed to effectively characterize the cyber-physical interaction of the smart grid and demonstrate how existence of the switching vulnerability is dependent on the local structure of the power grid. We identify and demonstrate how through successful cyber intrusion and local knowledge of the grid an opponent can compute and apply a coordinated switching sequence to a circuit breaker to disrupt operation within a short interval of time. We illustrate the utility of the attack approach empirically on the Western Electricity Coordinating Council three-machine, nine-bus system under both model error and partial state information.The open access fee for this work was funded through the Texas A&M University Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Fund

Survivor Buddy and SciGirls: Affect, Outreach, and Questions

This paper describes the Survivor Buddy human-robot interaction project and how it was used by four middle-school girls to illustrate the scientific process for an episode of “SciGirls”, a Public Broadcast System science reality show. Survivor Buddy is a four degree of freedom robot head, with the face being a MIMO 740 multi-media touch screen monitor. It is being used to explore consistency and trust in the use of robots as social mediums, where robots serve as intermediaries between dependents (e.g., trapped survivors) and the outside world (doctors, rescuers, family members). While the SciGirl experimentation was neither statistically significant nor rigorously controlled, the experience makes three contributions. It introduces the Survivor Buddy project and social medium role, it illustrates that human-robot interaction is an appealing way to make robotics more accessible to the general public, and raises interesting questions about the existence of a minimum set of degrees of freedom for sufficient expressiveness, the relative importance of voice versus non-verbal affect, and the range and intensity of robot motions

A Novel Distributed Privacy Paradigm for Visual Sensor Networks Based on Sharing Dynamical Systems

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) provide surveillance images/video which must be protected from eavesdropping and tampering en route to the base station. In the spirit of sensor networks, we propose a novel paradigm for securing privacy and confidentiality in a distributed manner. Our paradigm is based on the control of dynamical systems, which we show is well suited for VSNs due to its low complexity in terms of processing and communication, while achieving robustness to both unintentional noise and intentional attacks as long as a small subset of nodes are affected. We also present a low complexity algorithm called TANGRAM to demonstrate the feasibility of applying our novel paradigm to VSNs. We present and discuss simulation results of TANGRAM.</p