ePlaya

What robots have been on playa?

I believe there has been an RC portopotty. There is a robot camp with a DIY-built life size robot, remotely controlled with camera eyes and hearing, but it is silent.

There are plenty of robot dogs, humanoids, other pets, and companions for aging, popular in Japan. China is very advanced in robots.

I always thought telepresence for disabled people would be a great application for robots, like the movie Avatar.

Now comes a robot horse from Japan you can ride!

If you count SRL gear in 96 … well … there you have it.

I forgot about SRL. My first burn was '99, but I saw SRL in Seattle in '90. Definitely safety not guaranteed. They had come up early and mined Boeing surplus for weird parts. Of course the show started late, so everyone was standing around waiting. They started an about 8 foot tall centrifugal blower shaped like a snail shell blowing gasoline vapor. I got out of the way of that. Then they had a small tower with something looking agricultural and a hopper. They filled the hopper with boxes of agricultural live grasshoppers. It was designed to scatter the grasshoppers on the audience in the bleachers, but they clogged the mechanism. Years later they had a bad accident with a crew member struck in the head, and Mark is missing fingers. They are still around.

I don't remember details, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a few robots on the playa over the years. Not just people in cool robot costumes dancing about or having a great time. A couple were kind of radio controlled things, I remember a camp that had a couple smallish spider-walking things that people were watching intently. I haven't seen any of the robot dog designs (but have no doubt they've been there), and I remember seeing something that was like a 4 ½ or 5ish foot human that didn't speak, and was controlled via a cable tethered to some kind of controller. I didn't pay much attention to the controller part because I was mesmerised with what seemed like the smoothest and most human-like arm movements I'd ever seen in a robot up to that point.

I just saw a work presentation on a dog like inspection robot, ANYmal. There are ANYmal trainers!



One of its payloads can be a Leica lidar with color camera. It is fun to see the robot's point cloud view of the world. It would also be interesting to map all the streets of BRC as a point cloud.

They put one of these autonomous dogs on the streets of Black Rock City, the following could happen:

• Some burner sill spray paint it, including over the camera lens.
  DPW or a mutant vehicle will run it over
  it will get waylaid and stripped for parts
  it will be abducted and never to be seen again

It does seem like a potentially hazardous and expensive thing to ruin on the playa. Youtube has tons of demos of those types of things, and while there are now some out 'in the field' as it were, those clips are all in grasslands, or the woods, or a less extreme environment. Unless the thing is somehow ruggedized against not just sand but playa dust (which has the consistency of 00 flour and is a mildly corrosive alkali), things like moving parts and ventilation holes are essentially just more potential points of failure.

Even if someone were to bring one, I can't imagine that they would send such a complicated and expensive piece of kit off unattended. Burning Man may be filled with some of the best humanity has to offer, but the other side of the coin is also represented to some degree.