I found this exercise to be very enlightening and eye opening as to the possibilities of what can be accomplished when given a particular task in BCT. There were robots that conveyed art through light, color, and yes even by drawing in rice and hair gel. During research at home i discovered the idea to convey our art style by using a game of some sort. This evidently was carried out by emulating the movements of the game "Snake."Our entire class were given the same task and yet so many different ideas were generated showing a never seen before connection between art and robotics. Most popular of which throughout groups was themed by disco. (see 2nd video). I thought was very creative, but at the same time it didn't leave a mark that could be referred back to. It required camera effects in order to create the image instead of the robot actually drawing the image. Another robot that was made poured paint from an altitude onto paper using a 3 motor system that calculated what paint to mix including red yellow and blue. This i felt was a great idea because it would always produce abstract art differently every time determined on motion sensing. However i felt the 'artistic reward' should go towards the robot that responded to sound and recorded its own movements to show the user where it had been commanded by banging on the box. I think this because this robot used the best method of dispersing its paint. It was organised and actually could have been mistaken for true gallery art!

How i felt about my own project?
At the very beginning of the assignment we interpreted the brief as instructing us to draw an image only on the confines of paper. Because of this we were extremely limited in the variety of ideas that we produced. Our kit was also very limited with parts and components from the start so we were forced to simplify our robot and focus more on the programming side involving Mindstorms NXT. We decided that instead of creating an image or drawing based solely on interaction, we would use it to our advantage and incorporate a game into our design. This brought about a purpose for the robot and allowed us to explore more variables. Late in our production we were forced to change most of our ideas due to the fact that we were unable to convert what we had on paper into a usable program due to our limited knowledge of the language of the program. Instead we devised different methods to work around the problem. For example, at this stage in design I had the idea for the robot to play touch rugby, where u had to avoid obstacles and get to the other side of the playing field before being touched 5 times. This despite an immense amount of tutorial research was unable to be done so I decided that if we couldn't create an “end” to the game then we would have to work with a looping system. And it was from this that I was inspired to create a game similar to the game of “snake” on a mobile phone. We were now able to change the direction of the robot (acting as the snake) by simply touching the sensor. This also allowed us to interact much more than originally planned at the same time eliminating many unwanted variables that might ruin the game. Not only this, but the robot was able to interact with its own environment by detecting color. It was done by using many loops to compare different colors at each stop/start movement of the robot. This was a great accomplishment because it meant that we could introduce different environments and it would never draw the same thing, it would always be different. However in our last presentation we only experimented with circles regretfully. Not only that but it was designed to be used for much larger scale use instead of just A1 paper, this is because the aim of the robot was for people to steer it around the room using the touch sensor. I feel as though we did not convey our true intentions as much as we would have wanted to. Reflected back at our thought processes as a group I also feel as though we should have experimented with variations of different art styles. In a sense our thinking pattern was largely tunnel vision towards set goals of creating a game and not art. I feel if we had experimented with paint for example we would have created images that were more artistic. Yes, our 3 images were individual but they were also generic and visually similar due to the fact we only used 2 different colors, although the messiness of the blue pen did contrast well with the geometry of the circles. Overall I am satisfied in what we created, given more time I know that I would be able to unlock its true potential and explore a lot more in depth on the decorative side of this project.