Robotic lamp

Via Fabien, AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp by Guy Hoffman (MIT Medialab Robotic life group):

“AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior. The lamp’s design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp’s “objectness”, I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.

The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring.“

Why do I blog this? looking at human-robot interaction for possible client work, this artifact is interesting to me because it reflects the convergence between robotics and ubiquitous computing. Non-anthropomorphic behavior seems IMO a very relevant approach, leading to projects about a new category of objects.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Tangible/Intangible. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Robotic lamp”

  1. Jean-Baptiste Says:
    May 27th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

    Interesting also considering the research in your lab about lamps ;) Few years ago, researchers at PARC developped the concept of immobots, or immobile robots, by opposition to anthropomorphic robots. I think that this mix of emotional feedback, plus robotic skills could be superinteresting for blogjects or other communication appliances in the future. Here is a good video of how to interact with these objects with game controllers:

    http://www.pabr.org/sixlinux/sixlinux.en.html

    cheers,
    j*b

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