New Creative Robotics Course Merges Engineering and Art

The grief when a beloved dog dies. The jolt you experience when you have an idea. The protective love of a mother. These were some of the emotions engineering and visual arts students channeled and evoked through robots they created as part of an experimental Creative Robotics course at the University of California San Diego.

For their last project critique assignment, the upper division undergraduate students from both engineering and visual arts disciplines were presented with a very open-ended task: create an expressive machine. The mechatronic results were beautiful, haunting, funny and most importantly – completely unique.

“This experimental course is focused on creativity in robotics, and engineering in art,” said Jennifer Mullin, a teaching professor in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and faculty director of the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Experience Engineering initiative. Mullin developed and taught the course in partnership with Robert Twomey, a teaching professor from the Department of Visual Arts. “It’s a hands-on, open-ended, and a multi-disciplinary creative class, which is new for some students.”

Over the course of the quarter, students learned about pioneers working at the intersection of visual arts and robotics. They also learned about mechatronics, and the technical elements underpinning robotic systems: sensing and controls, bluetooth technology, computer-aided design, mechanical movement, degrees of freedom, microcontrollers and coding. Building on nine weeks of scaffolding and weekly assignments, they put it all together for the final critique and prototyped their own expressive machines.

These machines conveyed everything from the happiness a duck gets from being fed, to the embarrassment experienced when you find out someone is unexpectedly watching you, to the tranquility a student was channeling heading into finals week.

"Over the course of the quarter we asked students to repeatedly engage with questions of meaningful interaction and expressive behavior, drawing on the history of art and technology and on contemporary engineering research on these questions,”  said Twomey of the students’ creative process.

For some of the engineering students, learning to handle the ambiguity of art and artistic assignments was a challenge.

“For me, I think the biggest learning from this class is the painful process of unlearning that engineering is not just a functional tool,” said Miheer Potdar, a mechanical engineering student. “Even function has a secondary aspect to it that leads to further exploration. It’s very rewarding to see people's reactions when they realize the things that are happening under the hood. And that’s what engineering is about at the end of the day — something looks different than what it does.”

Mechanical engineering student Emma Tayao said the course also helped her see how she was unintentionally limiting herself without realizing it.

“This class reminded me of  how expansive engineering can be,” said Tayao. “A lot of engineering is solving certain problems, but here you’re not solving problems, you’re creating something new. For example, this opened my eyes to the kind of material you can use. I’m so used to 3D printing everything that for one of our first projects, when people were using fabrics, I was like oh I forgot there’s other materials out there than PLA. This final project is the first one where I actually incorporated that, and I think in terms of expressiveness, using something other than 3D printing was really effective.”

For visual arts student Brooke Lee, learning the technical elements that underpin certain mechatronics and art pieces frees her up to be even more creative in the future.

“I think before, I was always scared of the technical aspects, I didn't know anything about engineering or how to use anything electrical,” said Lee. “I’ve been having a lot of fun and it’s made me realize that it’s not as hard or scary as I thought it was. Before this class I would always think it would be so cool if I could automate certain things, but I didn’t know how to do that. Now, I realize that I can do it, and I can now incorporate these elements into my future work.”

The course was taught in the EnVision Art and Engineering Maker Studio, a hands-on, experiential education facility in UC San Diego’s Structural and Materials Engineering building where visual arts and engineering communities converge. The nearly 3,000 square foot studio provides a wide range of design, fabrication and prototyping tools, both analog and digital.