An all-powerful rigging system would allow us to move any object to any position and orientation in 3D space without human involvement. It would also allow the moved object to remain in place while other objects are moved about.
We've imagined a couple of "ceiling robot" systems which might be a way to pull this off. During the jam, I built a model of an idea I'd had in a previous discussion with Bret & Toby: plate-crawlin' ceiling robots!
The basic concept is that a bunch of solid plates (here, hexagons) are suspended from the ceiling, leaving slots between them. Robots can crawl around above the plates while objects are suspended on poles and cables beneath them.
So here's a red projector suspended beneath a green robot:
Building the model helped me think through some aspects of the design, both by myself and in conversation with the group.
When I put the first robot onto the model, its tiny push-pin wheels didn't give the robot enough clearance to stay out of the slots between plates. This fit the image of the system that I'd formed before: that robots would ride the "tracks" which formed along the edges of the slots. (This image is why I had picked hexagons for the plates – squares would demand sharp 90° turns, while hexagons only require 60° turns.)
But having the robot ride these tracks causes a pretty serious problem: We would really like the plates to be as small & densely-packed as possible, so that the robots can be positioned as accurately as possible. But if the robot is hanging out in the slots, then that puts a constraint on how small the plates can be, since the robots need to fit along the edges of the plates. In our jam discussion, someone asked what scale the model was built to. I realized that, for the robots to be a realistic size, the system would need to be several times larger than depicted, so the plates would have to be maybe 4-6 feet across. Depending on our desired usage, that might be ok, but at least at first glance, it is disappointingly far from our goal of moving an object to "any position".
Fortunately, the track-riding assumption is totally unnecessary. Big robots with big rubber wheels can just drive around however they want above the plates, as long as they keep their suspended poles/cables positioned above slots. The only limit to making plates as small as we want comes from the requirement that the plates be suspended from above – if each plate is attached to a steel rod at its center, then these rods will present a forest of obstacles for robots to navigate around. The horizontal gaps between adjacent rods will be about the size of the plates. That means the plates should be roughly 1-2 times the size of the robot. If the robot is 1 foot in horizontal size, the plates can be 1-2 feet in horizontal size, and that sounds pretty good to me. (Also, if you put a maneuverable drive system on the robots, you can make the plates square, which I think increases the density of slot positions.)
People asked about delivering power and ethernet to the robots. There are a few ideas for power. One is that power can be delivered by rails along the edges of plates. Another is that power outlets could be positioned at special stations along the grid, and robots could carry batteries to power movement between the stations. This second idea is based on the assumption that, while robots have fairly serious power requirements while they are in place, with computers and projectors and what-not running beneath them, they will have lighter-weight requirements while in motion (and motion won't last long anyway).
A similar pattern might apply to network connectivity. A robot in place, streaming video data from cameras or to projectors, will need a high-bandwidth connection. But a handful of robots moving from place to place might be able to get by with wifi. So maybe we can just have ethernet hook-ups positioned regularly along the grid of plates.
There are clearly a lot of details to work out here. But to me, the system now seems feasible.