Madeline Gannon is like a lion tamer of sorts.
She moved her hand before Mimus, watching as the white, eight-eyed beast responded to the motions. Would the robot move forward or become bored?
There’s no way to ask Mimus, named for the Latin root of “mimic.” Just record her responses and examine the code — she’s an industrial robot.
Ms. Gannon -— as artist and principal researcher at the studio Atonaton at Carnegie Mellon University’s Studio for Creative Inquiry in Oakland — is searching for ways that humans can better interact with machines in an increasingly automated world. She is looking for solutions where machines can complement human work, rather than drive traditional labor into obsolescence.
Studies suggest many blue collar workers will be displaced by automation in the coming years. In March, consulting firm PwC predicted 38 percent of American jobs could be potentially lost to automation by the early 2030s and the World Economic Forum estimates that over the next four years, 5 million people will be at risk of losing their jobs to machines.
At Atonaton, the research studio Ms. Gannon originally formed as Madlab R&D in 2012 to explore her interdisciplinary interests in design and robotics, she and one other collaborator merge machines with humanoid characteristics. They want to test ways humans and robots might better coexist and communicate in this seemingly dystopian future.
In the past, she’s been called both a “robot whisperer” and a “robot tamer.”
@madelinegannon of @AT0NAT0N in Pittsburgh discusses how we may coexist with robots in the future #SPAN17 pic.twitter.com/SPlZsFOVtp
— Courtney Linder (@LinderPG) September 14, 2017
“I get to play with robots all day. The work that I do is really about building more human-centered ways to work with monstrous machines,” Ms. Gannon said. “I might do that by building software interfaces that allow robots to respond in a lifelike, animal way.”
She has exhibited that through Mimus, her transformed version of an ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot, typically used in manufacturing.
The work is about infusing a pile of machine parts with personality, she said.
While Ms. Gannon learned to code late in life while studying at CMU, she said, her background in architecture has given her a hypersensitivity to how people move through a space, allowing her to imbue intelligent systems with body language and gesturing that helps a machine to understand people. Ms. Gannon earned a bachelors and masters degree in architecture from Florida International University.
Part of designing systems that allow robots to understand what a person is doing — rather than the other way around — involves hiding the technical side. Mimus doesn’t “see” through cameras affixed to her white body, but through sensors mounted on the ceiling.
But Ms. Gannon’s work is not just an exercise in aesthetics.
She is aiming to show that machines may be collaborators that coexist alongside human workers, using design to illustrate the complexities of automation.
“Oftentimes, the burden is on the person to understand how a black box piece of hardware is supposed to be used ... but human-centered design inverts this relationship,” Ms. Gannon said last week at Bakery Square-based co-working shop Spaces during Google’s 2017 SP-AN event, a conference converging technology and design.
Working to create more intuitive industrial robots is a necessity in collaborative manufacturing, wherein humans and robots work together. Beyond the cage that typically shields a machine, the robot can still work with high-risk materials or move objects far too heavy for a person, but can fall back on human decision making and dexterity to complete projects otherwise unattainable for either party, separately.
“[Pittsburgh] is the robotics capital of North America ... and we’ve had an interesting relationship over the past 50 years with these machines,” Ms. Gannon said at the conference.
“We are now getting to the point where the balance of power between humans and machines is starting to shift in the machine’s favor ... it would be much better if we were able to find a way for these machines to enhance, to augment and to expand our human capabilities.”
That could mean some sort of communication-aided collaborative manufacturing in the future.
Ms. Gannon’s work has involved hacking industrial robots to make cheaper hardware, creating open source software for character animation and programming a back massaging robot.
“There are alternative visions for how these robots can engage with us ... that have been overlooked in the pursuit of automation,” she said. “I want people to start thinking about these [robots] as creatures and not things.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
First Published: September 19, 2017, 3:34 p.m.
