James Bruton's Interactive Robot Performance Controllers

James Bruton makes a wide variety of robots, and if you’ve been following along lately, he’s been building towards what will apparently be a robot/human performance group — with him of course as the DJ. Naturally, a normal keyboard wouldn’t suffice for this type of interface, and it seems the plan is to operate the robo-band with his barcode guitar. In order to let the audience actually participate in the show, he's also come up with a few implements meant to make the performance more interactive.

Three such devices are outlined in the video below. The first is a trio of hefty knobs, supported by bearings that turn an encoder in order to modify RGB lighting values. A second uses ultrasonic sensors to enable robot and/or sound control just by waving your hand over it, and the third contains 10 pinball-style buttons for music modification—or whatever Bruton eventually decides.

Each of the units connect to the system using what appears to be a fairly uniform Arduino Mega/Ethernet shield setup. This allows it to send out OSC (Open Sound Control) data over Ethernet. MIDI and DMX protocols are used to control the system, along with software including Ableton Live and QLC+ (Q Light Controller Plus). The performance at the end of the video is quite entertaining, and the methods presented could certainly serve as inspiration for your next project as well!