MedusAI

Recently built interactive exhibit using strings, drums, and robotic arms to create a robotic musician that uses vision and audio input to modify lights, robot movemnents, and string playing.

Role: Construction, Robot programming, Design, Project Manager

medusai is a multi-modal AI driven robotic sculpture that responds to and interacts with humans through sound, light, touch, and movement. Inspired by the Greek myth of Medusa, the sculpture features seven robotic arms in the form of “snake hair” installed on top of 8x10 ft. metallic “face” structure. Human movement around medusai is captured by a top mounted camera and an artificial vision tracking system drives the robotic arms to follow humans, pluck strings, and hit drums around its surface. medusai also responds with light and electronic sound to humans’ activity such as drumming and plucking strings.

Photos of medsai at our debut event

The project is inspired by the Ancient Greek myth of Medusa, who was born as a mortal maiden known for her beauty and good nature. After being raped and abused, Medusa was cursed by Athena to become a snake haired monster who turns anyone who looks at her to stone. The medusai project builds on this myth as a metaphor for the societal effects of AI in our current time. The project captures and reflects on the good intentions and promises of AI on one hand and the risks and threats on the other. The eerie and uncanny notion of AI-driven robotic snakes following and threatening humans is countered by the sculpture’s potential to inspire humans - musicians, dancers, museum visitors - to push the boundaries of their creativity and expression by interacting with the AI driven robotic sculpture.

Full project website can be found here.

Our first event was a soft opening where medusai played itself as an instrument and also danced with dancers. We sent live robot information to the animation on the walls so the robots on the walls moved with the robots.

The next stage of this project worked on improving different types of human robot interactions. Working on an interactive exhibit is different than musicians because there is less explaination between parties. Part of the challenge is figuring out how people,without prompting, try to move with medusai, challenge responses, and stay to interact. In interaction mode, medusai will snake and react musically to music inputs. However, if users move in a threatening way (detected with a classifier and YOLO) medusai will play a scary sound, stop dancing, and follow the threat.

In our third event, we hosted a workshop and worked with 3 dancers and 2 musicians to create an hour long show, which was performed at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta.

This event featured 4 acts highlighting different facets of Medusai: Medusai improvising based on music input, Medusai responding to gestures, Medusai generating gestures, and Medusai generating gestures while playing.