Embedded - 142: New and Improved Appendages (Repeat)

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

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 Road, her YouTube channel, and/or her Robotic 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 at embedded.fm/subscribe.

This is Embedded FM. I'm Alicia 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. So, Chris, do you have any questions to get started? Sure. Introvert or extrovert? Introvert.

Cats or dogs? Neither. Form or functionality? Ooh. neither form or functionality neither art or engineering both uh i broke the streak uh most important tool to your daily work uh soldering iron, keyboard, mouse, or pencil? Probably pencil. Really? Okay, cool. Favorite fictional robot?

Oh, man. I love Data. That's Data. That's a good one, yeah. Gryffindor or Hufflepuff i hate harry potter is that that's not one word but i'm sorry no no this is why we ask the same questions often of different people because we want to explore all of 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 i have unfortunately oh oh no oh no i'm like

everyone's gonna hate me yes i have seen it she already said data was her favorite robot yeah so you know that that makes it for a lot okay um in what year will the robot war start um i'm working on this year but we'll see i don't know war if 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 um and i you have one more sure but i'm afraid to ask now uh 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, definitive, excited yes. I like that. Especially raptors. That sounds like the thing we should definitely not bring back. Brontosauruses. The slow ones.

The ones we can outrun. Yes. They make life interesting, right? 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 many, 100, 150? I think we've got 100 by now, but we show in our installation, because it is like a kinetic art installation, we show 84 of them. Why 84? It's not nine by nine. Two of them broke. No.

I hope I'm quoting the right number. So the installation is modular. Makes sense. 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 sitting there collecting pensions and dust.

Yes. Okay. You control them with a connect leap, some sort of thing where you've danced and they dance. to one, one-on-one. We were thinking of using one of those EEG devices, like the 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. And once we realized how impractical that was, we started experimenting with the Kinect 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, 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 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 going to need a video of that. Yeah. What is the strangest thing people, I mean, they've been out in the world without without you what is the strangest thing people have wanted to do with them um the strangest thing people people and this is a clean radio show so for it you know keep it clean okay i just made that so much worse didn't i um well um since you put it that way, um, strange in a non, non whatever way that there, somebody wanted to get a bunch of them and stretch like nylon over them, which I guess isn't really weird, but since that isn't what I envisioned them to be, it feels weird to me. They wanted to put fabric over, uh, uh, kind of an array of them and watch the like nylon 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 a little 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 a Delta robot. Do you, 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, they're not going to 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 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. Doing the wave. They can do the wave on their own. 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 one's 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 sensors you'd need more sensors yes input right yeah maybe but other people, you have instructions for how to build these robots, right? Yes. And you did a Kickstarter involving said instructions. We did two years ago now. Wow. My partner Mark and I did our first Kickstarter for this art installation. 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. It's open source. So if you wanted to take on building your own and kind of just using our 3D printed,

our 3D printable parts and the blueprint to our baseboard and our code, you could totally do that. If you email Mark or I with 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 yeah, it was at least a good number of people did were you aware of the uh

the book um 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. sci-fi fantasy authors got together and 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. Wars is for world domination. Yeah. How's that going out for you? 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 army just came back from, I believe, overseas. It wasn't the whole army. It was, we sent one unit to Tokyo for their, they have a, 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 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 lottery select one of the robots to send away

because I felt horrible just picking one. So the one we picked, I think 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. And every time you talk,

you start to talk about Noodle Feet 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, or little kid. And you'd be so amazed noodle feet 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 whateverodle, I started building him last January and he was 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 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 gonna 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 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 comic Gravity Road that I started illustrating is, I more or less started doing that because I wanted to keep in practice with the drawing

because I, for a couple of years, didn't 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, you get really bad at it fast so the web comic 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 little crab with lamb legs because of the noodles. I don't know. You know that 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. A lamb crab would eat crab lambs.

Yes. All right. Okay. But yes, he has the crabby legs. I get that. And then why do you say his legs are lamb-like? Well, right now, since he's mostly 3D printed parts, they're very wobbly. Oh, okay.

They're wobbly when he walks. And then he has the thick white noodle material for his like 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 the feet are really complicated i mean there's there are many servos what what do the feet do and why is there uh like blow up stretchy material what is the noodle i have so many questions the the so each of his legs uh they they lift and they spin for movement, right? So the, the motors in his 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 cylinder. I don't know if it's going to end up being noodle material anymore at this point because there's actually working systems inside of it. But it's a foot that contains the mechanism to support retractable toes. There's a feeding syringe that will hold fluids so that he can drool out of the center of each of his feet from a silicone tongue. This is God. 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. Oh. No, no, no, go on. This is amazing i'm essentially building something that can hold you in place well it tastes you and drools on you and salivates but 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. This is kind of important, I guess. Noodle, 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 um you know those basters the barbecue basters that hold the marinade and then you you can squeeze them and brush the fluid onto your meat yes they look sort of like expelled plato if you put plato through like a colander and 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 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. Proboscises.

Yes. And they dart down from the center of his foot and they juice. Retractable proboscises. Yes. Everything I've worked on has been dumb. Why am I not building things like this? Have you considered going into movie practical effects?

I no. No, because 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. This is a lot. 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 i have a like i said the majority like 99.999 percent of my like academic history was spent studying 2d art like i did all illustration and stuff and then at the very very end um i was

going to school at saic in chicago i had 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 decided to drop all of my printmaking classes and just sort of go and do it. And I signed 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, probably it was the most single most important thing I think

I've ever done in my life because everything that I've done after that one four or five month period is a result of what I learned in those classes that I took. It inspired me so much that 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. I got the permission that 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 kind of amazing because the way that the school worked is 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 that class, and you would come up with a project that you wanted to 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's whether, 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, you learned how to use the technology, not how to design the technology. Yeah. I mean, you're still putting it together in amazing ways.

So to heck with how magnets turn into motors. Yeah. Like 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 like 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 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 uh that step from the so the internet is amazing for one for like a point of departure i guess like if i'm i i know 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, the form noodles form dictated, um, what sort of mechanical legs I, mechanical legs I looked up and researched and decided I was going to go with. 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,odle is more or less, he's like popsicle sticks with screws in them, right?

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 adding onto 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 in the back, which was an addition. And I don't know. Once I had the basic lengths and proportions of the bones, I added everything else to those because that was 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 used like woodgears.ca or something. There's a gear generator online that you can use where you just type in like ratio of gear teeth that 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 do have done any of this before 3d printing became ubiquitous you kind of depend on that or is it doable without yeah it really helps it really helps like when i 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 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 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 many iterations of small parts

in more complex systems. It's the most invaluable tool ever. We also, 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, it's the Replicator 1 and it has the dual

extrusion and it's a beast. It's a beast. We printed over 7,000 parts on it during the year we were fulfilling our Kickstarter and we didn't have any major problems with it at all. Like, 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. They, I 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 of years old. I don't know right now. Maybe it's time. The whole money thing.

How do you make a living as an artist? I don't make a ton of money as an artist. 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, um, 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? Um, we, we don't have a store. We just have our business. It's Robot Army LLC. So like 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. It is difficult to make a living as an artist, at least from what I've heard. And this diversification of doing the webcomic and Kickstarters and selling parts, 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? On the days that I just work on Robot and Sarah's 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? Um, I take, I will do like freelance graphic design work and, um, I'll do illustrations, uh, when I need it, but only when I need to get the money to keep the life going. But otherwise I try to, 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. And 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

i agree that was a really tortured metaphor it really it was i could do 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 I, everything that's in the workroom eventually becomes either electronic or robotic in some sense. It's just, that's, 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 it 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 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. I know that you're based 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 totally agree. I don't know how that would work, but we'll figure it out. That might be like 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 a flamingo and takes off. Yeah. 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 flamingoomb, which is better. Yeah, really, flamingobomb is the way to go. Flamingobomb. Deal. I will let you know when that happens. Controlling a ball robot, an inverted pendulum ball robot, it's non-trivial math wise are you looking at an off-the-shelf controller are you writing the software yourself are you i thought you went into art instead of engineering

because you didn't like math so i i love the mechanic like building the mechanical things the moving parts the physical stuff um i, I know very, very, very little about, uh, writing code. So Mark, my collaborator, he, 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, and 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, he's my partner, uh, like our, our group, like Robot Army, the thing is the two of us. So it's our company. We complement each other very well. He has 20 plus years of experience as a circuit board designer. And he tends to design, well, doesn't tend to, he designs the final revision of our boards for our projects and he writes all of the code and that's his area of expertise.

And then we both will decide on kind of the art direction, the overall vision for an installation or a project together. And I will design the mechanical, like 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 um the imagery like the cartoons and the comics and uh 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 all of 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, I brought him to Supercon 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 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, 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 just because you know he might get scared it should be a lamb crab so you'd mentioned earlier in the show, we did the lightning round. You chose introvert instead of extrovert. Yes. And 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 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 hate, um, like the, 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 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 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 am 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 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 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, that these two people are talking, how am I, 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, uh, hi, my name is Alicia. Can I stop talking now? Please don't look at me. Uh, totally hits hits me, that fierce shyness. I totally agree. I hear that. I relate 100%. It helps to take a wing person, someone else you know. A wing noodle.

A wing, yes. I like that. And actually having, 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. 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. And then somebody invariably says, what the hell is that? And I say, well, here it 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 it's i do this horrible thing or 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 and of course they've already moved on i know they don't even remember you. Yeah. But yes. But you do it anyway. And you realize it's like 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 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 sigh well if we're ever to conference together you can always enter you can always like 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, you will you embrace noodle into your heart i can get past the introvert part but i'm not sure about the germaphobe part so it'll be clean water in fact i was thinking of using hand sanitary in there that's awesome so you don't you don't have to worry about that. If she uses hand sanitizer, you can ask Noodle to lick all of your hands. Right. Let's move on. All right.

All right. Your blog includes a lot of explanation and instructions. instructions and you do you mentioned earlier about how illustrations well I was sort of summarizing it in my head is they're worth a thousand words you you get a lot more you can pack a lot more information in why is that important to you a lot of it goes back to the the story like the creation of the identity and the story behind something. Like 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 thing as branding in essence. Like you're in a sense branding your process and your image and your style 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 moment in history and 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 like solidify that universe that I'm trying to create. And it, 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, um, 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 isn't taking away.

So yeah, I get that. Oh, 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. Both of you, actually. What are your favorite types of robots? I have seen a couple of these ones with the soft bodies, 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 don't, 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 and... 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. It hasn't happened yet. Right, right. Oh, I forgot. I want to be surprised.

Sure. It can only be good. All right. 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? I'm probably afraid of one falling on me. That's about it. I think that I'm afraid of them in the sense that anytime I see one, it's being abused. Yes. It seems 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 ran in with hugs i don't know i don't know what have

you seen the video where somebody overdubs screaming over it yes 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 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 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 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, how wet are you going to get? I mean, that's all you're risking at that point. That's true. This episode has so many show titles. But I think that was one of the things Big Hero 6 got right. Because 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, 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 actually liked the plot. But you can skip the plot and just gaze at the wonder of the amazing robots. I totally will.

It's on 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 has been on it that we watched recently was the ex machina movie which i loved but um big hero six and i think chappy are both on there and i haven't seen either oh chappy's still on our list we haven't seen that one chappy i'll be honest oh go on sorry christopher's giving me the the the the 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 uh endeavors art projects i'm not quite sure what to call them but zoness.com z-o-n-e-s-s dot 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.