Airy: Reading Robot Intent through Height and Sky
This addresses the issue of safety and trust for the public in industrial robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing design principles for human-AI interaction.
The project tackled the problem of opaque AI decision-making in shared human-robot spaces by creating an artwork where two reinforcement-trained robot arms snap a bedsheet skyward, resulting in audiences consistently reading the robots' strategies and emotional reactions that mirrored the system's internal state.
As industrial robots move into shared human spaces, their opaque decision making threatens safety, trust, and public oversight. This artwork, Airy, asks whether complex multi agent AI can become intuitively understandable by staging a competition between two reinforcement trained robot arms that snap a bedsheet skyward. Building on three design principles, competition as a clear metric (who lifts higher), embodied familiarity (audiences recognize fabric snapping), and sensor to sense mapping (robot cooperation or rivalry shown through forest and weather projections), the installation gives viewers a visceral way to read machine intent. Observations from five international exhibitions indicate that audiences consistently read the robots' strategies, conflict, and cooperation in real time, with emotional reactions that mirror the system's internal state. The project shows how sensory metaphors can turn a black box into a public interface.