Get ready for "Roombots," modular robot orbs that can move through a house, joining together and merging with your furniture or other household items in order to make them mobile and movable.
Such conglomerations of Roombots can create furniture that can change in functionality and shape to meet a person's needs over time, the developers at the Biorobotics Laboratory in Switzerland say.
Each 9-inch Roombot module is equipped with three motors, a battery to power them, and an antenna to control its movements and actions. The module looks like two large dice joined together.
Small gripping "claws" allow the roombots to link together with each other or climb specially-prepared surfaces that can be attached to a person's existing furniture.
In a video released by the developers, Roombots that have attached themselves to a table top to act as its legs and can move the table toward a person and then adjust its height.
Furniture that adapts to the movements and requirements of someone could be a benefit to people with physical challenges or the elderly, says laboratory head Auke Ijspeert.
"It could be very useful for disabled individuals to be able to ask objects to come closer to them, or to move out of the way," he said.
Not wanting to design completely robotic furniture from scratch, the researchers decided to go with a hybrid form, which would use their Roombots with existing "passive" elements like tabletops or lamps to create mobile furniture capable of moving around a room.
"It could be very useful for disabled individuals to be able to ask objects to come closer to them, or to move out of the way," Ijspeert says.
Other researchers could use Roombots as a kind of Lego block, allowing them to "find their own function and applications," he says.
The Swiss researches say their next step is to develop methods of controlling the Roombots. They're experimenting with using tablet computers or gesture or speech recognition.
They'd still be at our beck and call, the researchers emphasize.
"I don't envision a scenario where the robots are completely autonomous," engineer Massimo Vespignani says.
Roombots are still in the prototype stage, the researchers say, although they could be commercially available in 20 years or so.
