WALT DISNEY’S film version of “Mary Poppins” features a scene in which, at a click of her fingers, cupboards, drawers, bedside tables and trunks fly open and her young charges’ clothes and toys leap inside them. Self-tidying clothes and toys are still some way away, unfortunately. But furniture that collaborates with its owners may be just around the corner. If groups of researchers working on the idea in America and Europe have their way, you will soon be able to call a robot footstool, so that you can put your feet up at the end of a long day, make use of a robotic toolbox and even install a robot toybox in the nursery that will encourage your children to tidy up after themselves.
The secret of
success is not just to devise furnishings that will do what they are told, but
to give them personalities, convincing their owners that communication with
them is a two-way process.
One device with
obvious commercial potential is a robot rubbish bin that can tour places like
fast-food restaurants, soliciting trash. This was invented by Wendy Ju and
David Sirkin, of Stanford University. Tests have shown it to be popular with
customers. The robot approaches a table and wiggles on the spot to gain
attention. People quickly get the idea of what they are supposed to do, and
respond accordingly—even looking around for extra rubbish to feed the robot.
Francesco
Mondada, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Lausanne, has used a
similar approach to encourage children to tidy up their toys. His mobile toybox
is a wheeled crate with rotating eyes and colorful lights. It moves around a
room until it spots a toy on the floor. It then stops, appears to look at the
toy with its eyes, and flashes to prompt the kid who has left it there to put
it into the crate.
Another piece of
robot furniture, this time a toy rather than a toy-tidier, is being developed
by Aaron Steinfeld and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, in collaboration with Disney. It is a mobile, talking, one-meter-high
robotic chest of drawers, nicknamed Chester. One of the drawers has an animated
face that entertains groups of children by telling them stories. Other drawers
open at appropriate moments, to offer the audience paintings and photographs.
Dr Ju at Stanford
is working on a robotic cabinet that will assist by opening the drawer that
contains the right tool at the correct moment. Its drawers will be motorized
and put under computer control, so that they open and close in expressive ways.
A drawer can, for instance, move in and out slightly to indicate it may contain
something pertinent to the task. Appropriate hand gestures by the user will
then tell the drawer to open completely, if its contents are needed, or to
close, if not. Once the user has finished his masterpiece, Dr Ju jokes, the chest
might even applaud with a Mexican wave of individual drawers opening and
closing in sequence.
The idea of a
chair that can move around on command—and also get out of the way automatically—might
take a little getting used to, it is true. But who could resist the idea, once
he has sat down in it, of whistling for a footstool and having it in exactly
the right spot to receive a pair of tired feet.
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