AASS Seminar - Musical Robotics
19 april 2018 13:00 T141, Teknikhuset
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The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Antonio Chella, University of Palermo, Italy.
Abstract
Musical robotics is a new discipline in robotics aimed at employing robots in live musical performances. Musical robotics offer new means of expressions to artists and composers, that may take advantage of embodiment and situatedness capabilities of a robot. The seminar will briefly review previous implementations of musical robotics, and then it will discuss two performances involving the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo: the RoboDanza and RoboticsLab Concerto. RoboDanza is a music and dance performance based a cognitive architecture embodied in a humanoid robot able to create and perform dances driven by the perception of musical rhythm. The system has been implemented on a NAO robot and tested in public setting-up live performances as the opening ceremony of the BICA 2015 conference in Lyon. RoboticsLab Concerto is a musical performance at the Conservatory of Music in Palermo on October 2016 and May 2017 involving a NAO robot acting as a conductor of a string quartet. The robot avoids the mere mechanical imitation of the human conductor and it assumes the role of empathic mediator between the audience and the performers in a continuous loop.
Speaker's Bio
Antonio Chella is a Professor of Robotics and head of the RoboticsLab at the Department of Industrial and Digital Innovation (DIID) of the University of Palermo. He is the Director of the Interdepartmental Center for Knowledge Technologies (CITC). He is a former coordinator of the course of study in Computer Engineering and the Ph.D. program in Technological Innovation Engineering. He is a former director of the Department of Computer Engineering. He coordinated several Italian and European research projects. He is the author of more than 200 publications and an editorial director of scientific journals and of book series in the fields of Robot Consciousness, Computational Creativity, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. The research activities of prof. Chella have been subject of articles and interviews in national and international magazines and newspapers, including New Scientist and The Guardian.