Blimp Ballet

Two autonomous flying artefacts encounter a cavernous space. Their curiosity is piqued; they explore and map out the space, discovering its properties and its boundaries. However, they are not alone. The space itself interacts with the robot flies, observing, following, touching them. The actors have to find a balance with this complex environment. This results in a three dimensional autonomous machine ballet where the actors define their environment and the environment shapes the actors.

The performing blimps are part of an EU project to create autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles for chemosensing applications (AMOTH). They integrate leading-edge technologies in biologically inspired neural flight control, chemosensing and sensory processing to achieve autonomous behaviour.

The Blimp Ballet is an example of the intelligent artefacts being developed by the research group of Paul Verschure since 1995 within the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University/ETH Zurich. Previous works created by this group include the neural music composition system Roboser demonstrated at Cyborg Frictions (1999), and Ada: Intelligent Space exhibited at the Swiss Expo.02 (2002). The research activities of the Institute cover a broad range of topics in basic and applied neuroscience. The overall goal of this work is to discover the principles by which brains work, and to implement these principles in artificial systems that interact intelligently with the real world.