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And Yet it Moves

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October 2008


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!And Yet it Moves
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IDSC
Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control


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DMAVT
Department of Mechanical & Process Engineering


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Swiss Federal Institute of Technology




 !And Yet it Moves
Sculpture in Motion

Self-Balancing Cube
2008/2009 Project: Distributed Flight Array
Acrobats, dancers, athletes, students of the martial arts and the like know that elegance of motion flows from years of practice and study.

So, too, does Raffaello D’Andrea. Having spent a good portion of his research career giving mathematical expression to motion, D’Andrea knows first hand what it takes to get an autonomous vehicle traveling smoothly from Point A to Point B. He has even choreographed whole fleets of them. 

But, like a dancer or acrobat, the thrill for D’Andrea is as much in the performance as it is in the practice. Having witnessed the delight on viewers’ faces when they watched his robotic soccer team swiftly outmaneuver their competitors, or listened to gallery-goers talk of his robotic collaborations with artist Max Dean as having ‘personality’, D’Andrea knows that his mathematics can inspire an audience outside the engineering college lecture hall. 

So when, in 2007, he was offered a full-professorship at ETH Zurich with the freedom to design his own research agenda, he seized the opportunity to take his work on autonomous systems to a more unconstrained and creative paradigm than the utilitarian model that scientific research is typically based on.

Between 2007 and 2009, D'Andrea ran a project class in which students designed and constructed a dynamic sculpture for public display. Using fundamental principles from mathematics and physics to overcome seemingly impossible feats, the class aimed to create objects that conveyed the beauty and elegance of engineering and mathematics on a visceral level.
Self-Balancing Cube
2007/2008 Project: Self-Balancing Cube

Building on the successful team-based approach he developed while taking Cornell University to four RoboCup soccer championships, D’Andrea pulled together an interdisciplinary team with expertise in mathematics, engineering, computer science, systems design and the arts. While individual students concentrated on specific aspects of the system, such as mechanical, electrical, algorithm, and interface design, the group regularly met as a whole to ensure the successful integration of all areas of the project.

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