Rhythm Bots: A Sensitive Improvisational Environment

Rhythm Bots is an actively controlled kinetic sculpture and art-making exploration of research on collective intelligence and collective behavior. The sculpture comprises a group of gentle, rhythmically rotating robots that propagate movement changes across a network in response to one another and to human audience members who sit with or move around them. In May 2024 at Princeton University’s Wallace Theater, we created an emergent environment, sensitive to stimuli, composed of twelve rhythm bots and human audience members. Each bot independently controlled its own movement according to its evolving “opinion” states while also activating lights and sound. Collective artificial intelligence was implemented through a distributed, decision-making model known as nonlinear opinion dynamics (NOD). Yolov3 and DeepSort were used to detect and track individual humans, whose presence “excited” the attention parameters of nearby bots and sped up neuron-like dispersion of signals across the communication network.The piece draws on the expressiveness of the underlying dynamics model to encourage exploration of the ambiguity in the human-robot feedback loop. Audience members were naturally motivated to learn the boundaries of what emergent patterns they could induce, developing their own notions of “real” and “non-real” influence on the environment. The overall result was a peaceful, evolving environment featuring emergent synchronization modified by input and intermittently interrupted by input-triggered dynamic movement, light, and sound events. Connecting lights and sound to the space and to the robot behavior made the research more visible and audible, while enhancing the meditative nature of the environment. Rhythm Bots provides a creative platform for further art-making, novel human-machine physical interaction experiments involving movement, light, and sound, and continuing opportunities to use intelligent machines to impart in people positive feelings of wellbeing.