Czech scientists have helped bring art to life. Their system controls a flying belt installation

Up to 100 leather belts suspended in a room respond to visitors’ movements using a control system developed by experts at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia (FAV UWB). Visitors become both observers and the observed. The same algorithms also control industrial robotic arms.

What does it look like when programmers get involved in art? A leather belt with a metal buckle is suspended from the ceiling by three or six thin cables. The cables securing it to a rotating base are transparent, so it almost looks as if it’s levitating in the space around the visitor. Furthermore, motion-detecting cameras track the visitor, and the belts themselves react to this movement. They typically move toward the nearest person or suddenly shift into more complex geometric patterns.

Movement is provided by so-called actuators, which are electric stepper motors located in the base. The main task of the control system, developed at the FAV UWB, is to plan and execute actuator movements to achieve the fastest possible change in the orientation of the suspended belts. During development, the researchers used a method known as input shaping. “It works by having the control system avoid giving the machine a single abrupt command to move, which would cause significant unwanted oscillations and instead divide it into several precisely timed smaller segments. We have successfully applied this principle before, for example, in controlling a robotic arm designed to test automatic transmission components, in planning the movements of industrial manipulators, and in controlling theater stage lifts, cranes, or high-speed elevators,” explained Martin Goubej from the Department of Cybernetics, outlining the potential applications.

The path taken by experts from the Faculty of Applied Sciences into the art world led them through the Canadian company Antimodular Research, which creates large-scale interactive installations and develops its own display and sensor technologies. “Overall, it was an excursion into a relatively unusual area of interactive art for us, but within the context of solving a problem we were very familiar with from the industrial environment,” Goubej recalled of the early days of the collaboration. The art installation was presented at the Bitforms Gallery in New York, one of the oldest exhibition spaces in the United States.

Experts from FAV are discussing further possible improvements to the system and additional art installations with Antimodular. An article in which the team of experts describes the design of the control systems in detail was published in the prestigious IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. A video demonstration of the motion control is available on the FAV YouTube channel.