Swarms of small robots rolling around on the ceiling can reconfigure rooms by moving hanging curtains or lights around 鈥� or store and then drop small objects such as keys and balls to humans below.
鈥淲hen you look up at the ceiling, it is unutilised space for these robotics technologies,鈥� says .
Nakagaki and his colleagues at the University of Chicago modified Toio consumer robots from Sony and attached magnets to them. That allows the robots to cling to a mat with underlying metal plates installed on a ceiling surface, forming the basis of two related research projects.
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One project, called AeroRigUI, incorporates a reeling mechanism to raise and lower objects attached to a string. Multiple robots working together can create more complex motions in 3D space, such as turning and pointing a hanging light or following a walking person around to keep their personal space illuminated.
Such robots can also move models of planets and stars around to mimic real-life orbits, flap the wings of a bird model suspended in mid-air or move a puppet鈥檚 limbs. 鈥淧eople can use their hand to control the objects鈥� movements in the air,鈥� says , part of the team.
The second project, called ThrowIO, gave the robots a two-armed prong on one side and an angled wedge on the other. The prongs can push around a ball or any other object magnetically attached to the ceiling, whereas two robots working as a team can use the wedge side to detach and drop the object from the ceiling.
The ThrowIO system tracks the movements of the thrown ball or object by using a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor. Each robot can figure out its own location on the ceiling mat by using a built-in camera to look at the micro-patterned mat surface.
Beyond demonstrating ceiling storage and retrieval possibilities for keys, the researchers created interactive games displayed on monitors or projected on the ceiling that incorporated the throw-and-catch interaction.
One game involved directing a digital bird to help pick digital oranges, which were then dropped to the person below in the form of a physical orange ball. 鈥淭his gives users a really tangible way to interact with robots,鈥� says team member .
The requirement for a magnetised ceiling is 鈥減retty specific鈥�, says at the University of Maryland. But Peng says he likes such projects and could 鈥渇oresee such ceilings being introduced during the construction process of a building鈥� if the robotic applications prove useful.
Reference:
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ,
