Opera Mecatronica

35 meters below earth in a unique 13000 m3 exhibition space, which was Sweden’s first nuclear reactor, designed for scientific research, built in 1954 and phased out in 1970s, robot marionette Olimpia and robot swan Robocygne perform mecatronical dances at the Opera Mecatronica exhibition in Stockholm.
Olimpia is a three‐meter tall three‐dimensional creation built from rusty and patinated machine parts that dance in a curiously human like manner whilst singing an aria from The Tales of Hoffmann.


Swedish choreographer and dancer Åsa Unander-Scharin and her team of composers, visual artists, computer programmers and robot designers have created six installations at the exhibition Opera Mecatronica. The dancing robot swan Robocygne is dancing to Carl Unander-­‐Scharin’s electroacoustic version of Tchaikovsky’s majestic music from Swan Lake. Robocygne was developed at Mälardalen University and had its debut at the Swedish Book Fair in Gothenburg in September 2010.

Robot Theater in São Paulo

The Portuguese robot artist Leonel Moura, creator of the first zoo in the world for artificial life Robotarium (2007) has recently debuted with his redesigned Karel Capeks classic play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in São Paulo, Brazil. The artist famous for his creative robot installations uses real autonomous robots, acting and interacting with human actors. The navigation system to guide the robots on stage and the interactive abilities that give life to these machines was developed by  the Portuguese company selfTech, a spin-off of the Lisbon's Institute for Systems and Robotics



(Source/credit: selfTech, Leonel Moura)