Embedded - 142: New And Improved Appendages

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick Christopher's leg. Christopher agrees reluctantly once we determine the saliva will be anti-bacterial hand sanitizer. Sarah is a kinetic artist and some of her projects include a robot army (built your own from parts printed out or purchased at robot-army.com), Noodlefeet, and Carl (the flamingo of pendulum inversion). Her Zoness.com site is an umbrella for her drawn and robotic art. Specifically, you may enjoy her webcomic Gravity Roads, her YouTube channel, and/or herRobotic Arts blog. Some other topics we discussed: Sarah got into mechatronics at her time as SAIC. Festo's air jellyfish on youtube Algodoo.com 2d physics simulator Woodgears.ca for 3d printable gears Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up atembedded.fm/subscribe.

This is Embedded FM. I'm Eliseo White. My co-host is Christopher White and our guest is Sarah Petkus, commander of the First Robot Army. One thing before we beg for mechanical mercy, our multimedia empire continues to grow. The blog and the show now have a newsletter you can get in your email. Given my inbox, I have no idea why you'd want such a thing. And I respect your different opinion and bow to your request. To sign up, go to embedded.fm, hit the subscribe link,

and then maybe the blog link to look around. And then if you feel so inclined, share these links with your friends. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for being on the show today. Thank you for having me. Could you tell us about yourself? Let's see. I am a kinetic artist

who builds robots and other mechanical devices that are based on the characters and environments from my illustrations. Kinetic artist. That is an interesting and not standard title. Kinetic artist. Well, let's see.

My background stems from illustration and printmaking, but I've moved into the interactive realm. So everything that I make these days moves and is roughly robotic. So I think kinetic artist is appropriate. Very cool. I mean, I wasn't, it's just, you know, we talked to a lot of engineers and a couple of artists and I hadn't heard that. And yet it does kind of evoke movement. All right. All right.

We usually do this lightning round thing where we ask you short questions and want short answers. And then if we're being very good and disciplined about it we don't ask for explanations that never happens uh so chris do you have any questions to get started uh sure introvert or extrovert introvert cats or dogs neither Form or functionality? Ooh. Neither. Art or engineering? Both.

I broke the streak. Most important tool to your daily work? Soldering iron, keyboard, mouse, or pencil probably pencil really okay cool favorite fictional robot oh man i love data that's a good one yeah uh gryffindor or hufflepuff i hate harry potter is that that's not one word but i i'm sorry no no this is why we ask the same questions often of different people is because we want to explore all the possible answers and that is that is a good one it's a neither. Burn it down. Have you seen Star Wars?

Although now I'm a little afraid to ask. I have. Unfortunately. Oh. Oh no. Oh no. I'm like, everyone's going to hate me.

Yes, I have seen it. She already said Data was her favorite robot. Yeah, so, you know, that makes it a little Star said Data was her favorite robot. Yeah, so, you know, that makes sense. The Star Trek side of things. Okay. In what year will the robot war start? I'm working on this year, but we'll see.

I don't know, war? If we're talking like a command and cuddle type war, then hopefully this year. I mean, that's the goal every year, though. Command and cuddle type war. Excuse me, we're typing that down right now. And you have one more? Sure, but I'm afraid to ask now. Who do you find inspiring?

And there's a list of people here, and you don't have to take any of them. Tesla? Jebs? Who's Jebs? Jobs. Jobs, oh. Edison, Wozniak, Grace Hopper, Elon Musk? I think Elon Musk and Tesla are inspiring, yeah.

Should we bring back the dinosaurs? Yes, we totally should. Nice back the dinosaurs yes we totally should nice definitive excited yes i like that especially raptors that sounds like the the thing we should definitely not bring back brontosauruses and the slow ones yeah the ones we can outrun yes make life interesting right uh is that so that your robot army has something to do so you have a robot army tell us more okay um so my robot army consists of miniature delta robots so they're not like unless unless we're talking stomping the world flat, they're not very threatening. The Army was based on illustrations that I did a long time ago in college that depicted people kind of waiting in a field of incandescent light bulbs in the dark. So it's totally departed from that by this point. It's kind of taken on this militant like army sort of imagery and I've made a lot of propaganda to kind of like promote it in that way. So even though

they aren't very threatening, they are our army and we're very proud of our kids. And so you have how how many 100 150 i think we've got 100 by now but we show uh in our installation because it is like a kinetic art installation we show 84 of them why 84 um it's not nine by nine two of them broke no the uh i'm hoping i'm quoting the right number it's so the the installation is modular so they're um they're in kind of like these pallets of seven so we have 12 pallets of seven and we can kind of move them around however we like and that's why there's 84 specifically and then we have about 10 or 15 retired ones that are like in the workroom as fixtures they're actually there collecting pensions and dust yes okay you control them with uh connect leap some sort of thing where you dance then they dance

the original intention and we're still sort of working towards this is that um a one person would be capable of controlling them very um one on like one to one one-on-one um we were thinking of using like one of those eeg devices like Epoch or whatever was out in the past. But once we discovered how they're not really the greatest thing since sliced bread, they don't really do exactly what they say that you can with them. Those are the ones that say they can read your mind and they're totally bogus? Yes. Okay. I think they're only slightly bogus.

They're pretty bogus. I mean, if you have a 50-50 chance of going one way or the other, and this brings you to a 50.00001% chance of going one way or the other, which was what it felt like to me. I think you have to train on them, but yeah, okay. Okay, okay. But yes, okay. Mind control. Mind-controlled robots.

Yes. Nothing can go wrong there. Everybody wants to control robots with their mind, right? That's got to be everyone's bucket list item. I think, at least for me. But we wanted to go in that direction. the connect and the leap because we did want to continue like developing the installation so that people could control the robots and experience what it was like to have these machines as an extension of their body and um we began doing development with the connect but it was a lot harder to get them to um look right I guess, because the signal, or it would lose sight of the person it was tracking and then they would do kind of strange things

and it kind of broke the feel, like the illusion, I guess. So we started playing around with the leap, with the discrete hand control and it's a little bit more graceful I would say and people figure out how to use or interface with the robots a little bit easier this way too because they we have the leap mounted in a podium right now and people kind of just they figure out immediately that they're supposed to do something with that and they'll wave their hands over it and very quickly figure out that they can control the robots.

But we're still, we're constantly working on new ways to control them because now that we do have the 84 robots, it's just a matter of, well, what other things can you do with 84 robots that would be cool to see, right? I have so many ideas. So many ideas. Like, can they be a backup band for my gesticulations for my next conference presentation? Because that would be so cool. Totally. Yeah, they can be your backup dancers.

But it's kind of actually what we're going for this year. Like I made propaganda to pass out at Maker Faire this year and it actually shows them as like backup dancers behind mark and i and we're doing like the disco and there's a disco ball above us and i don't know we're gonna need a video of that yeah uh what is the strangest thing people i mean they've been uh out in the world without you what is the strangest thing people have wanted to do with them? The strangest thing people... And this is a clean radio show, so keep it clean.

I just made that so much worse, didn't I? Well, since you put it that way. Strange in a non-whatever way. Somebody wanted to get a bunch of them and stretch nylon over them or whatever diffuse the light and kind of undulate and change shape. And that seems like a really cool idea, but I would never have put fabric over them. Was it Christo? Because I hear he puts fabric on everything. I don't know. It's possible. It could have been. Somebody,

one of our friends actually put a Halloween costume on one of them and it looked like one of those little spider monkeys underneath a sheet like running around doing weird things

like dancing and stuff. And it was really believable. Like you thought it was like a small creature dressed up like a ghost dancing around but it was just believable. Like you thought it was like a small creature dressed up like a ghost dancing around, but it was just a Delta robot. Do you ever have any fears about them gaining any autonomy or are they really, really well wired down? I would say I daydream about them being autonomous.

They're like my kids, right? They all have their own little personalities and stuff. So like, I would like them to be autonomous so they can be my little pets, but I think we're pretty safe. They're not gonna become autonomous. They are what they are. It seems like you have enough of them that you could start playing around with things like the game of life or other similar simple rules-based, cellular automata-based things where they would interact with each other and then do different things based on those interactions.

I don't know. I'm just thinking they have a lot of little, little things that you could take things that are normally on a screen and make them physical. I would love to make them more behavioral. I've talked to Mark about, for me, I was originally thinking of just choreographing them to look like they're having maybe a conversation with each other.

So you're kind of like this voyeur watching this herd of robots kind of you know communicate they can do the wave on their own even even if they were like some of them were leaning towards each other and acting a certain way and then something would happen at the other end of the installation that would like get all the other ones attention and they would like lean over in that direction and change a certain color and you got like this distinct sense that they were aware of one another and alive but to have them do that autonomously would be even cooler i have no idea how we do that but that was yours you'd need more sensors yes input right yeah maybe but other people you you have instructions for how to build these robots right yes and you did a kickstarter involving said instructions we did um two years ago now wow we um my partner

mark and i did our first kickstarter for this art. And we brought the design of the individual robot to market as a kit. And we called it the Robot Army Starter Kit. And you could buy one of the robots. And in return for buying one, you were basically affording a robot cousin in our art installation for us to keep. So we sold about 250 kits and we built about a hundred and then use the rest of the money for like support materials and the bases and travel to some of the first places we went to. But yeah, the projects it's ongoing. We're still building it up and we're still selling kits and we do have all of the code we develop and the design

of the parts uh it's open source so if you wanted to take on um building your own and kind of just using our 3d printed our 3d printable parts and the blueprint to our base board and our code you could totally do that if you email mark or i with questions we'll be happy to answer them too and how many of the kits that you sent out do you think got built i mean did you get pictures of here's my robot we got some we got like i want to say somewhere between like 10 or 20 people immediately took pictures of what happened to their robot because we were kind of encouraging people to name them and then like tell the story of their unit like where it is in the world and what it's doing and some people did and some people didn't or most

people didn't actually but um yeah it was at least a good number of people did. Were you aware of the book? It's an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories called Help Fund My Robot Army and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects. I think someone sent me a link to that at some point in time and I looked at it and I didn't know where it came from. I didn't have any context for it. Tell me more about that. It's an Amazon book and it's a number of normal sci-fi fantasy authors got together and they each have their own kickstarter pitch just and most of them look exactly like the kickstarter page and one of them they ask you to help fund their

robot army and it's it's not for an art project in the end i believe it's for world domination but you know potato potato wars is for world domination yeah how's that going out for you it's it's been fun as long as we have fun that's the important part right we don't have to get there but your your army just came back from i believe overseas um it wasn't the whole army. We sent one unit to Tokyo for their, one of their hackerspaces has a designed objects contest every year. I think it's UFAB, the UFAB juried show. And we submitted our project.

And as finalists, we sent in one unit for them to i don't know put on display and look at and judge so we i couldn't i actually couldn't pick one to send away to tokyo i felt as like a mother i didn't know 100 that i was going to be getting the robot back because i don't know you're sending it away across the ocean and who knows what's going to happen and I had to use a random number generator thingy to like lottery select one of the robots to send away because I felt horrible just like picking one so the one we picked I think it it was, I forget the number, but its name was Ming of all things.

I think Mark and I named an entire palette of robots after our favorite cooking hosts from Create TV. I don't know if anyone, like, do you watch Create? I don't know, we do on PBS. We don't, but we might now. Okay, when we were assembling a lot of the robots, we had that on in the background. So it just seemed appropriate that we name a palette after our favorite chefs. So we named one Ming and it's the one that got

to go to Tokyo. And I haven't been there yet that I want to. So I'm kind of jealous of this robot. Do you know that the robots aren't people? I just want to know that you know that although when I watch your videos it is something I see that you I'm going to switch topics because it will make more sense if we talk about noodle feet and that's one of your new projects yes Yes. And every time you talk, you start to talk about Noodlefeet as though it is a robot sitting over here. And then a second later, you switch to, and then Noodle did this. It's just like, like, like he's your, like he's your, you know, young friend or little kid. And you'd be so amazed. Noodlefeet licked the floor today. Yes. Yes. He's my one year old he's totally my one year old he's um he has his own socks and everything like i have a

collection of clothing just for him noodle that yeah whatever noodle um i started building him last january and he was uh from originally a dream but he's a character that i started like drawing in the margins of my sketchbooks because i had dreamt about this thing and the more i drew it the more i wanted to actually build it because it became a character that i used in um in my writing and I wanted to see it exist in the real world. And it was a huge challenge to build a quadruped robot. And it involved a lot of things that I know nothing about. So if I did succeed in building the Noodle Feet character, it would mean that I learned all of these things necessary to make it possible. So I was like, all right, let's do it. And he's a project that I'm continuously working on.

I don't know if he's ever going to be done. I don't think that's the point. But I kind of, I treat him like my child because he's learning to walk. And he's learning to do all these things that I think like a small toddler baby human baby would be doing too if that makes any sense it does actually I've I've had robots take care of yes no I and now we do this and now you get power and here you go um but your writing uh is that your is that gravity roads your web comic yes okay i i um i mentioned i i have a strong background in like traditional arts i guess like i i got started doing illustration and printmaking and painting and whatnot. And I love to write and I more or less got into doing art related anything because of the fact that I liked to write about things.

And if you can illustrate an idea that you have in your head, it's a lot easier to show somebody what that idea looks like than write a whole essay about it if that makes any sense and once I started you know drawing everything the next step was to actually make the things that I drew right and Noodle kind of followed the same process the the comic Gravity Road that I started illustrating is I more or less started doing that because I wanted to keep in practice uh with the drawing because I for a couple of years didn't um really draw or paint or do anything all that much and it made me sad and drawing is one of those things where if you don't do it um you get really bad at it fast so the webcomic kind of keeps me like uh you know stretching that skill consistently and

it makes me happier to be doing it regularly and i'm i'm the comic is loosely about the things that i am actually making so they go hand in hand and so in the comic well and in real life noodle is he looks sort of spider-esque he's got a body and he's got, I want to say, elbows or knees that are upward. Maybe I should let you describe him. I'd say if Noodle had a spirit animal, he'd be like a crab lamb. He's like a... A crab lamb. Like a little crab with like lamb legs because of the noodles.

I don't know. When you're doing crosses, you really shouldn't cross predator and prey species. It goes badly. What would a lamb crab eat? I don't know. Lamb crab would eat crab lambs. Yes. I'll go with that.

But yes, he has the crabby legs i i get that and then why do you say his legs are lamb like um well right now since he's mostly 3d printed parts they're very wobbly like okay they're very they're wobbly when he walks and then he has like the thick white noodle material for his like i guess I guess his feet, calf parts. And they do look very like little, the little chubby baby lamb legs, I think. And they're driven, the feet are really complicated. I mean, there's, there are many servos. What do the feet do and why is there like blow up stretchy material? What is the noodle?

I have so many questions. So each of his legs, they lift and they spin for movement, right? So the motors in his hips hips there's two per leg so he's got eight in his body and then um not currently installed in him at the moment but in the works are big kid feet i'll call them big kid feet um the next uh iteration of his individual feet is a four inch thick um cylinder I don't know if it's going to end up being a noodle material anymore at this point, because there's actually like working systems inside of it. But it's a foot that contains like the mechanism to support retractable toes. There's a feeding syringe that

will hold fluid so that he can drool out of the center of each of his feet from a silicone tongue. You thought me, when I said he licked the floor, you thought I was kidding. I just... You were just like, yeah, whatever.

So he drools and then he can lick things up. Yes. He has... And he's got little claws retractable. Well, thanks for being on the show. It's been fun talking to you. Christopher needs to build a bunker.

No, no, no, go on. This is amazing. I'm essentially building something that can hold you in place while it tastes you and drools on you and salivates but it i've had this nightmare it's um this is why people buy dogs it's it can leak so i didn't mention this and this is kind of important, I guess. The whole point of Noodle was that he's a leg hugger. He's supposed to be able to walk on the ground and locate the legs of humans nearby and then walk towards them and lean on them. And that was the original plan for him.

So it would involve some computer vision. And I have the pie mounted in his head to support the camera that will eventually do that. But I haven't made it that far yet. But he was supposed to be a leg hugger. And along the way, along the journey, and many late nights drinking beer and talking with Mark, like I kind of decided that it would be humorous if when he recognized certain people, he had different behaviors and it would be really humorous if when he walked up and leaned on certain humans, he left a little wet spot or like voided some fluid, I don't know, out of some response to whomever

and that evolved into the syringe that holds the fluid and then he has a little silicone tongue that's you know those basters the barbecue basters that hold the marinade and then you can squeeze them and brush the fluid onto your meat

yes they look sort of like expelled play-doh if you put play-doh through like a colander and it... It's got little fingers. Yeah. It's got lots of little tiny... Little bristles.

Yeah. So I found those in neon yellow because it matches all of the stuff that we make. And I ordered them from China

and they got here. So he has little yellow tongues that... Four of them. Proposcuses. yes and they they dart down from the center of his foot and they juice retractable proboscis yes everything i've worked on has been dumb why am i why am i not building things like this. Have you considered going into movie practical effects?

I, no. No, because then you have to do other people's ideas. This is such a great idea on its own. You have to be like Tim Burton and make your own movie and your own stuff. How big is Noodle Feet? I guess he's a leg hugger,

so he's probably knee high. Please lower. He's, I would say, maybe a little under two feet tall. Yeah, I'd say he comes to right under your knee. Making a robot move on four feet and then be able to lick you. This all has some mechanical challenges. Yes. It so does.

You have an art degree and you're doing robotics that is really, really cool. How? It's so I have, like I said, the majority, like 99.999% of my like academic history was spent studying 2D art. Like I did all illustration and stuff. And then at the very, very end, I was going to school at SAIC in Chicago, I had a professor approach me and they saw that I liked to draw robots and technology and like nerdy imagery and whatnot. And they basically said, you know, you really like drawing robots. Maybe you should try making robots instead. And the school happened to have an art tech department that was amazing that i knew nothing about i didn't even know it existed and since i had decided it was going to be my last

semester there i um i decided to um drop all of my printmaking classes and just sort of go and do it and i signed up up for a 4,000 level robotics class without knowing the difference between AC and DC electricity. And I knew nothing, like zero. And I went into it and it was like, it was the single most important thing I think I've ever done in my life because everything that I've done

after that one, like four or five month period is a result of what I learned in those classes that I took like it inspired me so much that I just that was what I wanted to do it didn't matter if I was in school I was going to figure out I was going to learn what I needed to know to make the things that I wanted to like I got the permission that I needed to do the thing and so was the class primarily mechatronics or I mean robotics for artists I mean this was an art school not an engineering school it was it was kind of amazing because uh the way that the school worked is uh you you didn't have to have any prerequisites to take classes, but if you didn't know any of the support knowledge, you had to figure it out on your own. You're kind of responsible for getting that knowledge from somewhere.

And you wrote your own curriculum. So you decided what your goals were for having taken taken that class and you would come up with a project that you wanted to build and it could be anything like whatever your your vision was for an art thing and you would make the proposal for it and then it was the responsibility of the professor to teach you the things that you didn't know, and they would fill in all the blanks. And then whether or not you fulfilled your own expectations of the course, your own curriculum, that would decide whether or not you passed or failed, if that makes any sense. So the professor had knowledge in that subject, and they sort of, like if you're doing a project that involved pumps and electronics then

they would teach you about pumps and electronics if you're making like a mechanical thing then they would teach you how to machine parts or 3d print parts and then they would like introduce you to the arduino and they would kind of they would teach you exactly what it was that you needed to know to make the thing that you wanted work but you didn't necessarily get all of the support knowledge that gave you the i don't know the uber foundation that i know actual like engineers who do electronics engineering get in school if that makes any sense it does i mean you learned how to use the technology not how to design the technology yeah it was i mean you're still putting it together in amazing ways so to heck with how magnets turn into motors

it yeah like you we would get a little bit of the how and why things work, but it was really about manipulating what was out there and getting it to do the thing that you wanted. And sometimes that involved beating your head over something that you didn't quite understand entirely. But if you got it to work, then that was what was important. So when you signed up for this class, you had to say what you wanted to build at the end in order to figure out if you would pass. By the way, my brain is so exploding over that idea, but let's just skip on past and go to what did you say you wanted to build? What was your goal then? So I mentioned earlier that the robot army was inspired by these illustrations I used to do of people waiting over incandescent light bulbs, like fields of them. And I used to draw a lot of those, and I'm not really entirely sure where that came from, but right around the time that I went to Chicago to go to that school, that's what I was drawing. So when I was presented with the

challenge of building a mechanical thing, the first thing that popped into mind was building an actual incandescent light bulb flower that responded to human interaction in some way. So I wanted to make the living light bulb flower, if you will. And the Delta robot is kind of, it's the evolution. It evolved from the incandescent light bulb flower, if that makes any sense. It's a result of having built that original

sculpture in that class and then it goes to the robot army and then straight to noodle feet or was there something in between um I built a lot of like little things like I started toying around with uh making a robotic jellyfish that was kind of inspired by the Festo's amazing uh robo jelly or jelly bot that they have that can kind of undulate and roam around in water and recharge itself and stuff and I've started a bunch of other projects since then but Noodle's really the sole focus of I don't know he's my baby how do you learn the mechanical parts as as someone who I mean the software yeah I do that in my day job, it's pretty easy and the electronics sure I know enough to get by but sometimes the motor spins and they're like okay and that's all you need to do

to make it walk and I'm like this is spinning and walking is jointed where do you get that step from? So the internet is amazing, for one, for a point of departure, I guess. I knew that Noodle had to look a certain way, right? Like that was my starting point. It wasn't merely making a robot that walked.

It was a robot that walked, but it had to look this way. And it's sort of the form, Noodle's form dictated what sort of mechanical legs I looked up and researched and kind of decided I was going to go with. And I found the parallel crossbar type legs, I guess. I don't know what they're called technically, but the legs that Noodle has. I found robots that had appendages that moved like that and I downloaded this free program called Elgadoo which is basically it's like a 2d you make shapes you connect them with imaginary screws and attach motors to them and assign properties to the motors and press go and it applies physics to everything and you can watch everything either succeed or explode but you can kind of roughly test out

how different like um proportions of shapes and different like lengths of things once connected how they will move and react so I was able to kind of like get an idea if I was on the right track with that program and then uh once I kind of got an idea what my proportions were going to be I would um draw everything out in illustrator and then uh make parts that I could 3d print and um noodle is more or less he's like popsicle sticks with like screws in them right they're they're flat really basic stick shapes and it was really just a matter of kind of figuring out what lengths everything needed to be and then uh like adding on to them like I think he has like a spring that kind of helps him that helps take some of the load off of the motors uh in the back which was an addition

and I don't know once I had once I had the the basic lengths and proportions of the bones I added everything else to those because that was like the problem I had to solve first and then as far as the gears and everything go I had some help from people who had made gears before but I figured out what my proportions of gear teeth needed to be to one another to get them to turn the amount that I wanted and then it was a matter of just exporting like the flat dxf like outline of gears I think I use like woodgears.ca or something there's a there's a gear generator online that you can use where you just type in like the ratio of like gear teeth you want, and then it will generate the vector DXF flat shape,

and you can bring that into CAD software and then extrude that upwards and figure out how you want to connect it to the gear shaft of your motors and whatnot. And I used that program to make his moving gear bits. So could you have done any of this before 3D printing became ubiquitous? Do you kind of depend on that, or is it doable without?

It really helps. It really helps. The first Delta robot I ever made was made out of Tupperware and hangers and stuff. Like it was made out of like stuff I had around the house and duct tape. And it totally worked, but it didn't look very pretty. And on some level, I had kind of come to terms with the fact that my robots were always going to be made out of garbage because I didn't really have access to a machine shop at the time and our hackerspace wasn't open and it was very difficult but once the 3d printing element

was introduced it totally made life amazing I want to say no because being it's very important to be able to design the wrong thing quickly like in 10 minute intervals of failure over and over again and then at the end of the day having the working thing then having every failure take like two weeks and like 20 30 dollars between iterations like I think I would give up if I had to do that every time I wanted to develop to develop a system like 3d printing really it's yeah I don't have to say that you you know we don't actually we're still waiting for a 3d printer someday soon it for proto for making things like noodle to be able to burn through like like many iterations of small parts in more complex systems.

It's the most invaluable tool ever. We fulfilled our entire Kickstarter with our personal 3D printer, so we wouldn't have been able to do the small run production that we did without it. What kind of 3D printer do you have? We have the Replicatorator one and it has the dual extrusion and it's a beast it's a beast like we printed over 7 000 parts on it uh during the year we were fulfilling our kickstarter and we didn't have any major problems with it at all. Like other than a couple clogs occasionally,

but like there's no major unsolvable issues. That's always been what's held us back from getting 3D printers is the fact that I always hear how temperamental they are and that you basically have to babysit them and it's never seemed worth it. I've seen people who have had some of those really frustrating, unsolvable problems, but we're kind of lucky in that it just didn't happen with ours.

It's always just kind of behaved. We're also lucky that on the couple occasions that something weird did happen, there's a couple people at our hackerspace that either knew what the problem was from their experience or they were just an expert in fixing 3D printers. So we had some help along the way. So we didn't get to that point of frustration with them. And the replicator is the MakerBot. They make that one.

Is that right? Yes. How much was it, if you don't mind me asking? I think it's a Marks, but I think he paid $2,000 for it at the time. It was the dual extrusion one, though. So it probably costed slightly more than the standard single extruder one i'm not quite sure well and mostly i hear bad things about the ones that cost under 500 and yet that information is a couple years old i don't know right now maybe maybe it's it's time

um the whole money thing how do you make a living as an artist um I don't make a ton of money as an artist I I make enough money from project to project to continue funding further projects. Like the thing that kind of happened as a byproduct of doing the Kickstarter is Mark and I ended up with this company that we have now. And we use it to kind of market the things that we create as products and push them out into the world

and promote what we do. And then with the money we make, we use that for the development of our art and the next product that we're going to add to our store. So we kind of have this dual art collective company sort of business identity, business model going on. And we aren't really necessarily making a lot of money yet. But the thing about us being artists is we can apply to, we can apply for grants and residencies and we can apply to go to, you know, conventions and fairs and stuff like Maker Faire.

And since we do have the big art installation now, that's sort of our ticket to really cool places. So, yeah. What's the name of your store? We don't have a store. We just have our business. It's Robot Army LLC. So robot-army.com is our storefront

and that's where we promote the things that we create and sell and you have instructions for building there and all sorts of stuff okay well we'll make sure that's in the show notes uh it it is difficult to to make a living an artist, at least from what I've heard. And this diversification of doing the webcomic and Kickstarters and selling parts, and it seems very necessary. Does it lessen your enjoyment of the whole thing or is that part of it? I think it's all super exciting. I've never done any of this before, so it's kind of, I don't know, it's coming at me in a big wave and I'm just trying to stay on top of it. But for the

most part, we have control over everything that we do. So even the really mundane, crappy, miserable parts are exciting and happy and filled with some joy because it's our robots that we're shipping out. It's our gigs that we're setting up for. It's fun. We're building a brand we're building a kind of our own universe and there is a lot of joy in that yeah I can see that what's a work day in your life like um on the days that I just work on robot and Sarah stuff. I more or less will start out every morning drawing because I think drawing is the most important thing in the world. That's just me.

I will work on either drawing my comic or making some sort of promotional imagery for our company till about noon. And then I will literally work on robot stuff until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open but I love it so it doesn't bother me and then the necessary breaks in between to eat and whatnot of course and do you have to have another job to support this or are you sort of in that position where you're able to do this most days? I will do freelance graphic design work

and I'll do illustrations when I need it, but only when I need to get the money to keep the life going. But otherwise, I try to keep my head down and work on our stuff because that's ultimately what's going to, that's leading somewhere, right? Yeah, because it's yours. Sometimes you have to mine salt to stay afloat, but you don't have to mine so much salt that you're drowning in it. Might as well have some fun with that. Make some

margaritas. Wow, that was a drowning in it. Might as well have some fun with that. Make some margaritas. Wow, that was a really tortured metaphor. It really, it was, I could go so much further. But it ended with margaritas, so that's all that matters. You hinted to me that you have a new art project. What can you tell me? So on my desk, on my bench, I have a bunch of objects that I've kind of, like, collected from random places over the years. And one of the newer residents has been this pink flamingo lawn ornament that I've come to call Carl. And everything that's in the workroom eventually becomes either electronic or robotic in some sense. It's just, that's what's going to happen.

And I knew that I wanted to do something with Carl's legs because he had these really miserable like wire post legs because he was meant to be stuck in the ground someplace and it was bugging me I wanted to give him some sort of like new and improved appendages so I whacked off his legs and I gave him a rod that balances on a ball so he's now a balancing robot inverted pendulum style yeah so he has the three motors and he's i am having his brain made at the moment so i'm waiting for that to come in so he's not technically balancing yet he's in progress but he has the pretty i want to call like a chicken foot like his um omni wheels and motors that sort of grip onto the ball and will be responsible for uh keeping him balancing it looks kind of like a bird foot i think i'm gonna call it that it's a little chicken foot that grips onto the pink ball

and he will be the coolest robot flamingo ever and I have other plans for him in the future I think that's he's going to be at the heart of one of our next art installations it's going to involve many pink things I'll say that uh I I know that you're based in in Vegas and please tell me you're going to take a picture of him outside the Flamingo Hotel yes I have to I really think you do yes I I totally agree um I don't know how that would work but we'll figure it out that might be like a a hackerspace project we can just like flamingo bomb the flamingo everyone can bring a flamingo and then like slap it down on the strip and then we can pull out our cameras and film what happens and then be out of there in another couple minutes everyone grabs the flamingo and takes off

yeah yeah let us know on twitter when that's gonna happen because that would be awesome be out of there in another couple minutes. Everyone grabs a flamingo and takes off. Yeah. Yeah, let us know on Twitter when that's going to happen, because that would be awesome. Yeah. Really? Yes. What is it called when you do that? Flash mob? Flash mob. Yeah. Okay. Flash mob. What did I say?

Did I say photobomb or something? I don't know. Flash mob is what I meant. I think you said flamingo bomb, which is better. Yeah. Really said flamingo bomb which is better yeah really flamingo bomb is the way to go flamingo bomb deal i will let you know when that happens controlling a ball robot an inverted pendulum ball robot it's it's non-trivial math wise are you looking at an off-the-shelf controller? Are you writing the software yourself? I thought you went into art instead of engineering

because you didn't like math. So I love building the mechanical things, the moving parts, the physical stuff. I know very, very, very little about writing code. So Mark, my collaborator, he does the majority of the code development and he's very, very good at it. So I designed his brain, like the board that will be responsible for running the motors and doing the maths. And once that comes in, he's going to write the code more than likely. So I don't do every aspect of all of our projects. I'm like, God, I don't know. I'm trying to learn what he knows but there are just some things that are way way way above my

head and things that involve like delta math and writing code with the delta math involved are just it's I'm not there yet so I do have help to answer your question well then Mark has been part of your art projects for a while. I mean, he was involved with Robot Army and building it and making sure that it was, I mean, when you build a hundred of something, it's not trivial to get them all similar. He's my partner. Like our art group, like Robot Army, the thing is the two of us.

So it's our company. We complement each other very well he uh he has uh 20 plus years of experience as a circuit board designer and he tends to design well doesn't tend to he designs the final uh revision of our boards for our projects and he writes all of the code and that's his his area of expertise and then we both will decide on um kind of the the art direction the overall vision for an installation or a project together and i will design the mechanical like the the physical designed object itself, I will do. And then I make all of the propaganda because I like to draw and I like to kind of tell the story of what we're doing through the imagery,

like the cartoons and the comics and the postcards that we make because that's a huge part of it. It's very important. I really like the idea of having a backstory for for your your artifacts i think that's i think everything should have a backstory yeah it's a it's i don't know it's a story it's as valid of a story as anything right it's fun it makes the archiving of it in that way feels really good when we go back and we look at it and kind of, I don't know, read it like a comic, I guess, if that makes any sense. Lambs are mammals and crabs are born out of eggs.

We're back to this again? I'm totally back to this. I'm designing Noodle Feet's pelican case as a giant egg right now in my head it will be awesome he'll have little friends in there and little buddies and little tiny teddy bear but probably mechanically sorry this is your art project i should find my own he's you know no he's i don't know it's not just the robot it's it's all the stuff that it's all about the noodle I've thought of the same thing though like the first time when I brought him to um I brought him to super con last fall and it was the first time I ever took a mechanical thing through the airport

like that yeah that's fun isn't it wondering if they're going to stop you. Hoping they don't. Wondering why they didn't. Yeah, I've been there. All right. You totally know then. And yeah, I wanted to, the whole time I was on the plane, I was thinking of making a custom carrying case for him that looked like a little rocket ship with like the little portal window on the front that he could kind of peek out. And I really think he might need a small stuffed animal. Yes. Because, you know, he might get scared.

It should be a lamb crab. So you had mentioned earlier in the show when we did the lightning round, you chose introvert instead of extrovert yes and i i know a lot of artists also would probably choose that how do you square that with having to be self-promoting and go to conferences and engage with people and um it seems like you know to be an artist is to be inward focused and yet have to be successful you have to be outward focused it's awful i i hate um like the i i understand that i have to do the promoting bit like i get it and it's it's easy to do social media and hide behind my computer and I've gotten kind of good at coaxing myself to to do that and I like to do that part and I hate like I hate doing

the talking bit I don't know if I'm answering your question I hate it I guess that's the the quick and like easy answer but I'm getting better at it and I want to get better at it because I recognize how important it is to kind of um stay like to be aware of like who else is doing stuff like you so that you can learn from them and kind of be part of the same dialogue as they are and I don't know it's important Do you think you'll ever not hate it? I'm not sure. It's not... I think experience will help with the talking about ideas in public.

I don't know if I'm ever going to necessarily get over the talking on stage to a bunch of quiet, silent people thing. That's, I think, always going to necessarily get over the the talking on stage to a bunch of quiet silent people thing that's I think always going to be intimidating but I don't know I might get better at it I'll still hate it though the talking on stage part that that part gets easy that part gets much easier with practice I hope. The conversations before and after have never gotten easier for me. What is it about them that you say continues to be difficult? Talking to a group of strangers breaking into conversations not knowing when it's okay to talk

about myself versus when i i mean i'm usually at conferences to talk about the podcast yeah and yet i don't want to be this advertising dork and yet if i'm at this conference, these are my people. They probably do want to know about the podcast or about my book or something, and I really am interested in them because I am always trolling for people to be on the podcast. So I am truly interested, and usually once we get past the hellos, I'm interested for other reasons, but it's still that these two people are talking, how they seem to be talking to each other and amusing themselves. I can't possibly go up and interrupt them. And if I do manage to interrupt them,

Hi, my name is Alicia. Can I stop talking now? Please don't look at me. It totally hits me, that fierce shyness. I totally agree. i hear that i i relate 100 it helps to take a a wing person um someone else you know a wing noodle a wing yes i like that and and have actually having uh like bring a hack and make her fair. Having something you're holding that you built really helps break ice. Because people will come talk to you and then you don't necessarily have to break into their conversations. This is true. Yeah.

Conversation starter. I have this enormous ring that gives me words and definitions when I tap it or will play Magic 8-Ball with me or even Pong. And that helps because I sometimes will go away and sort of play with it instead of engaging with people because it calms me down. And then somebody invariably says, what the hell is that? And I say, well, here it is is and then the conversations begin yeah and I don't know how to end conversations either it's like well bye-bye I'm going over here yeah yeah there are a lot of people nodding right now. I think this is what introverts are. Yes. Yes, the social awkwardness is real. And then we try to be extroverts.

And sometimes, a lot of people I know succeed very well. Even I succeed sometimes. But it's a lot more exhausting. I do this horrible thing where if I feel like i i did the extrovert thing i'll replay whatever i said a thousand times in my head the next day and then try to try to imagine how it was perceived by the other person hearing me which is crazy right of course, they've already moved on. I know this. They don't even remember you. Yeah. But yes.

But you do it anyway and you realize, it's like balancing an equation, right? You're doing like the conversation equation and you're trying to like solve for all the X's and it's awful. Why do we do that to ourselves? Well, one reason is that there is a huge, huge amount of studies that show people are happier when they're with other people, when they're meeting people and when they're talking to other people. And so if we all just hang out in this really lovely room that we're in, it's not as good as if you go out and meet somebody. And I think some part of us knows that's true as much as we don't want it to be true. Yeah, I think those studies were selecting for extroverts. I don't think so. I fantasize about being more social because I think

you're right. Like deep down, I feel like that's the thing my life is lacking but it's really difficult to balance I think the social and the productive portion of life those are the two elements I think that are most at odds with each other because the more so the more social portions of my life have been like these creative dead zones where I don't really focus on anything. And then I get really unhappy, but for like the other reason, because I'm not producing things. And yeah, at other periods of my life, I'll go in the opposite direction. And I put my head down so much that like people forget who I am and I'm like gone. Exactly.

Yeah. Ah, sigh. Well, if we're ever to conference together, you can always come up and say hello and I will be happy to see you. Totally. I would love that. We can have a beer and take a load off of all of the social introvert, whatever.

And Noodle can totally lick my leg. Oh, can he? He would love that. Chris is not thrilled with this idea. Oh, can he lick your leg too, Chris? If I ever see you, can you, will you embrace Noodle into your heart? I can get past the introvert part, but I'm not sure about the germaphobe part.

It'll be clean water. In fact, I was thinking of using hand sanitary in there. That's awesome. So you don't have to worry about that. If she uses hand sanitizer, you can ask Noodle to lick all of your hands.

Yes. Let's move on. All right. Your blog includes a lot of explanation and instructions. And you mentioned earlier about how illustrations, well, I was sort of summarizing it in my head as they're worth a thousand words. You can pack a lot more information in. Why is that important to you? A lot of it goes back to the story, like the creation of the identity in the story behind something like if you if you create for me I hate using the word but it's totally accurate if you create the propaganda

to support like a vibe or a feel or I'll just say like an overall idea surrounding your work and you support that with imagery I mean it's the same same thing as branding in essence like you're you're in a sense branding your your process and your image and your style and and why you do what you do. And for me to kind of develop the story of Noodle and the army and me and Mark at work doing our thing and how we felt at certain events and to kind of, you know, draw slumped over our computers like the next day because we had, you know, been bombarded by small children at the event the day before to kind of document that that uh moment in history in an illustration it kind of it's a digestible piece of information that people can look at and immediately relate to but it also helps kind of um like solidify that universe

that i'm trying to create and it i think it's crucial in a sense, because without, without the imagery, without the illustrations, like I could try to do that with just the robots, but there's something so accessible and exciting about seeing the world come to life in like a comic illustrative form that for what I do it's it's like 50% of it so it doesn't really take away from the building of the robots it it helps like make it more it makes it what it needs to be it's it's 50% of it that's a great answer. I mean, that it's, it isn't taking away. So yeah, I get that.

Oh, I, I don't know where else to go. I mean, I still have lots and lots of questions, but we have really hit so many things. Is there anything else you'd like to talk more about? I have a question for you sure

and both of you actually um what are your favorite types of robots i have seen i've seen a couple of these ones with the soft bodies and and they move around like little worms usually. And I have in my head an idea that revolves around that, but also having sort of like noodles toes, where they can come out and are almost claw-like, but extend from the soft body to have some rigid body effects as well. And I know they've done the little snakes that go through buildings for search and rescue purposes.

I'm fascinated by that and soft bodies. And yeah, okay. Chris doesn't like this. What is your favorite robot? I like anything with autonomy. So things that can explore on their own or have behaviors. I'm not really big on remote-controlled things. It doesn't seem like a robot to me.

Right, because you listen to the Syracuse robot or not. Not just that, but I just like the idea of something with its own personality and emergent behavior. So it doesn't matter necessarily what its form is, although the cooler the form, the better. But I just like things that know how to do things. That's part of the emergent behavior part. Yeah.

Explain emergent behavior. Things that do things that you didn't expect when you created them. Sort of like Conway's Game of Life has very few rules, and yet if you do the rules, you end up with weapons that shoot things. Little sliding creatures. Sliding creatures. Not necessarily that, but just, I want to be surprised by things I create. Or things that other people create.

Yeah. You know, it's exactly that attitude that lost us the robot war. Hasn't happened yet. Right, right. Oh, I forgot. I want to be surprised. Sure. It can only be good. All right think i think maybe i think maybe that's unless you have other questions for us christopher do you have any more questions i

wanted to know if she'd seen the boston dynamics robots yeah are you as terrified of them as we are they're i'm probably afraid of one falling on me but that's about it i i think that i'm afraid of them in the sense that anytime i see one it's being abused yes i mean it's like the wrong way to go about it yeah they're like why would robots ever want to take over one day it's like well that's why we beat them with sticks and stuff. It's like, come on. I don't know. I would never, even if I was testing it, I wouldn't take a hockey stick.

And it just seems rude. It's the reason why I can't call my robots it. It's just, it's rude, right? It's, I mean, my robots are non-gender, but he is so much more personal than it. And even if I was testing whether or not it could balance, I would probably, I don't know what I would do. I wouldn't use this, a hockey stick though. You'd run him with hugs.

I don't know. I don't know what I would do. Have you seen the video where somebody overdubs screaming over it? Yes. Yes. Yes. Nightmares Yes. Yes. Nightmares. Poor robots.

They need somebody to hug them afterwards. So there's some good with the bad. I don't know. Actually, you know, that would be a really good addition to those videos. Is not only the... We're sorry. We didn't mean it. There's like... Yeah. is not only that we're sorry we didn't mean it when there's like yeah you have to have a lot of

fine motor control to be able to hug a human and not hurt them if you're a robot i think not that i would know i wouldn't want to be hugged by a cougar robot not that it could hug you but those ones it would be interesting to i don't know would you hug a robot if someone walked up to you and said hey i programmed this thing to hug humans like would you do it i don't know you're asking us to let your robot lick our legs so it's not that far off well i don't know lick licking is a lot less like threatening than like hugging like that's like a squeezing embracing like matter of coordination and strength and control of strength like licking is just kind of like well are you how wet are you gonna get i mean that's

all you're risking at that point that's. This episode has so many show titles. I think that was one of the things Big Hero 6 got right. They had the soft robot and they made him soft because he was interacting with humans and they didn't want him to seem threatening. I haven't seen that movie and I feel like such a heel. Oh, you should. You totally should. You'll love it.

It's not Harry Potter. It's not Star Wars. It is totally different. And I think as a roboticist and as an artist, you should really see that movie. Forget the plot. Just look at all the robots. I mean, the plot was good. I movie forget the plot just look at all the robots i mean the plot was good actually like the plot but you can skip the plot and just just gaze at the wonder of the

amazing robots i totally will it's on my my list like mark and i actually have a list of sci-fi movies that we need to catch up on because we're bad and the only one that is has been on it that we watched recently was the Ex Machina movie, which I loved. But Big Hero 6 and I think Chappie are both on there and I haven't seen either. Ooh, Chappie's still on our list. We haven't seen that one. Chappie. I'll be honest. Oh, go on.

Sorry. Christopher is giving me the you guys have devolved into randomness looks. So I guess I should ask you if you have any final thoughts. that you guys have devolved into randomness looks. So I guess I should ask you if you have any final thoughts and we should go get beer and dinner and all of those things. Deal. I think as final thoughts, I guess I'll just repeat my mantra,

which is what I believe in. Don't let not knowing how to do something keep you from doing it. Do it anyway. And that's it. That's pretty good. That is pretty darn good. All right. My guest has been Sarah Petkus, kinetic artist, web comic author of Gravity Road, and robot cuddle commander. You can find a number

of her endeavors, art projects, I'm not quite sure what to call them, but zoness.com, z-o-n-e-s-s.com, or you can check out robot-army.com in order to get kits and to find out more about the army and its upcoming locations. Thank you, Sarah, for joining us. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for having me. This has been awesome. Thank you also to Christopher for co-hosting and producing. And of course, thank you for listening. Hit the contact link on Embedded.fm if you'd like to say hello or email us show at Embedded.fm and please do check out our blog. We're working hard on it and I think you might like it. We'll be here next week. In the meantime, a final thought to leave you with. This one's from

Neil Gaiman. May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful. And don't forget to make some art. Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.