ARbotics

ARbotics is the new field of Augmented Reality robotics pioneered by inventor S. Mann, in the 1970s and 1980s.

This work involved the mechanization of phenomenological augmented reality (PAR which is often also referred to as eXtended Reality = XR) using various machine tools such as lathes, milling machines, and the like, as well as home-made tools, and even repurposed tools like railway tracks, to guide mechanized metasensing light sources:

(Phenomenological AR as a form of visual art -- Impulse Magazine, Vol. 12, Number 2, 1985)

(Setup and testing with antenna terminals shorted: lamps not responsive to recieved signal.)


Stephanie Mann, age 9, using car racetrack in a similar way to her father's railway guide...

Examples

Collaboration with Marc:

Physical AR: ARbotics allows us to sculpt the world, e.g. mechanized cutting through snow to make snow sculptures as physical instantiations of phenomenological augmented reality:

Gravitational Waves visualized using ARbotics (SWIMbot)

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Sarang, aspiring astronaut+astrophysicist.
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Caption for above picture

I proposed the spinning SWIM idea to students in my ECE516 class, and Anshuman (a student in the class) wrote a 3D visualizer to visualize what the spinning SWIM would look like. Marc and I also built some ARbotics systems, and Max came up with some 3D printed designs. Pictured above are Ken, Max, myself, Anshuman, Sarang, Nitin, Adnan, and Pete, also working on the project. Stephen and Helton (not pictured above) helped in some of the earlier photographic capture of this project. Sarang helped debug the swim visualization code (fixed unintended peak at beginning of visualization), and together with, Marc, Max, and Sen (not pictured above), made an electro-mechanical prototype of the gravitational wave SWIMbot visualizer.

Sarang, Adnan, and Nitin, are working on using the Chirplet Transform to represent gravitational waves; you can clearly see that the signal here takes the form of a chirplet. In the same way that a wavelet is a piece of a wave, a chirplet is a piece of a chirp, i.e. a localized (windowed) chirp.

The above visualization is based on data from the LIGO observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.

More pictures:


(Collaboration with Stephen on capturing photo on his camera: Canon 6D)

SWIMbot: