UC San Diego launches Creative Robotics course merging engineering and art

The University of California San Diego offered an experimental Creative Robotics course that merged engineering and art. Engineering and visual arts students created robots that expressed emotions including the grief of a lost dog, the jolt of an idea, and a mother's protective love. Jennifer Mullin, a teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and faculty director of the Experience Engineering initiative, developed and taught the course with Robert Twomey, a teaching professor in the Department of Visual Arts. The hands-on class introduced students to mechatronics topics such as sensing and controls, bluetooth technology, computer-aided design, mechanical movement, degrees of freedom, microcontrollers and coding. Students completed weekly assignments before prototyping their own expressive machines for a final critique. These machines conveyed feelings ranging from a duck's happiness when fed to embarrassment upon being watched unexpectedly to a student's tranquility before finals week. Mullin described the course as focused on creativity in robotics and engineering in art. Twomey said students engaged repeatedly with questions of meaningful interaction and expressive behavior, drawing on art history and engineering research. Engineering student Miheer Potdar said the class involved unlearning the idea that engineering is only a functional tool. Fellow engineering student Emma Tayao said it showed her engineering can involve creating something new rather than only solving problems, and she used materials other than 3D printing for greater expressiveness. Visual arts student Brooke Lee said she learned technical elements she previously feared and plans to incorporate automation into future work. The course took place in the EnVision Art and Engineering Maker Studio, a nearly 3,000 square foot hands-on facility in the Structural and Materials Engineering building.