Activites week 1

Day 1 Fr 5-2-2010

On the first encounter of the theme next nature a lecture was given about what the theme is about, and who are responsible inside the theme.
This lecture included aspects which also can be found on the next nature blog .

The team got introduced to each other, and also a coach acquaintance founded place.
After the acquaintance we were put on an assignment for to present the afternoon.

In the afternoon we made our own Cadvre Exquise. This was done in 3 separate groups ( 2 of three and one of two people), each group creating a separate part. Afterwards we combined these on the computer. During the presentations each group presented their part and we revealed the result at the end. The coaches were happy to see that we really thought out these parts and what function they have in the body. Then we watched the other presentations and afterwards had a quick word with the Coach about meetings and about his opinion on our cadavre.

Day 2 Mo 8-2-2010

The first day of the project we started with a small introduction of ourselves. We discussed our goals and skills. We made some agreements about working hours and gave the leading role to Eduard. We created an email-account to store all documents and pictures created during the project. Luuk will be the webmaster of our blog: cadavreex.blogspot.com.

In the afternoon we divided into two groups: one for the purpose/goal of the device and one for the technical part of the device. The technical group brainstormed about functionality of the body parts and how to connect them. They had meeting with Mark de Graaf about centralized and decentralized embodied intelligence.
The purpose group came up with a lot of questions to be answered about the purpose of the product.
After this everyone individually described what they thought at that point what the product should be like.

Day 3 Th 11-2-2010

We started again with a Cadavre Exquis. Doing this every day will keep us sharp and is a good warm-up session. Because an Expert meeting with Rene Ahn was planned later that morning we tried a small brainstorm to make up some questions we could ask him. We concluded that it is still too early in the project to ask specific questions so we decided just to explain the project and see what the Expert had to say about it. As we all know experts like to talk about things they know and so he did.

Some notes:

-Calling the parts “Head”, “Torso” and “Limbs” already creates restrictions. Jellyfish don’t have heads.

-Connection is of course not only physical. Components have to talk to each other on some way. A way to do that if you don’t know what the other is going to do with it is having feedback sensors talking back to another component which will then judge if the component is doing ok or not.

-Why make the robot move/walk? It can also be a static robot interacting with its environment.

-Make small things. Bigger things are harder to make.

-Important: Create the robot its environment. This way you already make some unconscious agreements on requirements and options.

On Thursday afternoon we did the Belbin test to define team roles (Eddie has the results). After that, we searched for videos, images and websites as sources of inspiration. Then we planned "to-do list" for the following weeks. We'll brainstorm about the ideas of the robot in week 8 and go into details about the platform during the next two weeks. We planned have paper prototypes to prove our ideas in the mid-term presentation. To finish, we evaluated the whole week a bit and will continue it on Friday.