Walking shopping cart

A study in automating less glamorous aspects of society.

Carlos was a college kinetic sculpture project. I was interested in the concept of automating aspects of society that were considered not so "glamorous". Robotics are often used in environments which are considered dangerous to humans. Deep sea exploration, nuclear cleanup and volcanism are some of the "higher profile" adverse environments which robots are used. My question was, "What about other dangerous or hazardous areas?". For example, homeless people live in extremely dangerous environments. Shouldn't there be automated equipment used by this strata of society? So, for this project I chose to implement an automated walking, homeless shopping cart. I imagine now, to carry this project to completion I should have given the controls to someone who was actually living on the streets near the university. There was a large homeless population near the campus, and there would have been plenty of opportunity. Unfortunately, I had to disassemble the project for parts before this happened.