Playdough to Roombots: Towards a Novel Tangible User Interface for Self-reconfigurable Modular Robots
Mehmet Mutlu, Simon Hauser, Alexandre Bernardino, Auke Ijspeert
Abstract
One of the main strengths of self-reconfigurable modular robots (SRMR) is their ability to shape-shift and dynamically change their morphology. In the case of our SRMR system “Roombots”, these shapes can be quite arbitrary for a great variety of tasks while the major utility is envisioned to be self-reconfigurable furniture. As such, the ideas and inspirations from users quickly need to be translated into the final Roombots shape. This involves a multitude of separate processes and - most importantly - requires an intuitive user interface. Our current approach led to the development of a tangible user interface (TUI) which involves 3D-scanning of a shape formed by modeling clay and the necessary steps to prepare the digitized model to be formed by Roombots. The system is able to generate a solution in less than two minutes for our target use as demonstrated with various examples.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2018_playdoughtoroomb,
title = {Playdough to Roombots: Towards a Novel Tangible User Interface for Self-reconfigurable Modular Robots},
author = {Mehmet Mutlu and Simon Hauser and Alexandre Bernardino and Auke Ijspeert},
booktitle = {ICRA 2018},
year = {2018}
}