Proboscis has announced the successful field trial, carried out on Friday 3rd February in London Fields, of a public authoring feral robot...

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The project began as an EPSRC-supported Visiting Fellowship with Natalie Jeremijenko and has developed into a close collaboration with Birkbeck College's Department of Computer Science. It is part of Proboscis' Social Tapestries research programme: http://socialtapestries.net

Gathered data combined with local knowledge uploaded by locals

The robot combines air quality and carbon dioxide sensor and a GPS unit with WiFi communications to upload its geo-referenced readings to the Urban Tapestries platform. Over the next 2 months we will be developing a web interface to allow for more sophisticated visualisation and interrogation of robot sensor readings, and combining them with local knowledge uploaded to Urban Tapestries by people in the area.

Project web page - http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots/index.html

Field Trial Blog Entry - http://urbantapestries.net/weblog/archives/cat_prototypes_trials_demos.html

Short Film of 1st Trial - http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots/RFPA_LondonFields_Jan2006.mp4

Initial Visualisations - http://urbantapestries.net/weblog/archives/000151.html

Community Mapping Workshop Documentation - http://diffusion.org.uk/socialtapestries/D_STFR_Workshop_A4.pdf

About Social Tapestries:
Social Tapestries is a research programme exploring the potential benefits and costs of local knowledge mapping and sharing, what they have termed the public authoring of social knowledge. Over the next few years Proboscis will be developing a series of experimental uses of public authoring to demonstrate the social and cultural benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by mobile and network technologies. These playful and challenging experiments build upon the Urban Tapestries framework and software platform developed by Proboscis and its partners. For more details see the Social Tapestries site and the Urban Tapestreies blog at http://urbantapestries.net/weblog/index.html http://proboscis.org.uk