Have you ever worn a smartwatch and thought,
man, I wish this thing would crawl across
my body to my shoulder?
Well, have I got the robots for you!
Last week, engineers from MIT and Stanford
demonstrated some new robots at the ACM User
Interface Software and Technology conference
in Tokyo.
They call the robots Rovables and say they
can “move freely on unmodified clothing.”
Yes, that’s right.
These robots can cling to your shirt and crawl
around on you.
They hold themselves in place with magnetic
wheels.
You wear one set of wheels under your shirt
and the robot snaps into place on the other
side of the fabric.
The Rovable can then amble across your torso
at a leisurely pace.
After watching video of the bots in action,
I’d have to say they look equally cute
and creepy.
The magnetic wheels mean the robots can move
vertically across surfaces.
They can travel up and down arms.
And the robots are untethered.
All of their power, computation and communication
systems are self-contained.
The engineers hope to build Rovables that
have enough juice to power 30 minutes of movement
or eight hours of operation without movement.
In the future, once the robot detects it is
running low on power, it can navigate to a
charging port.
The engineers showed off robots with actuators
capable of giving haptic feedback to a user,
sort of like the way your phone vibrates when
it gets a notification.
Other robots snapped together to create an
LED nametag, demonstrating the modular capabilities
of the Rovables.
The engineers don’t intend to market this
generation of robots.
Instead, the Rovables are a proof of concept.
They illustrate what might be possible with
wearable robots in the future.
Imagine that you have dozens of tiny robots
on your clothing.
Each robot is about a square centimeter in
size and weighs so little that you don’t
even notice them.
The robots can move across clothing, navigating
autonomously to different areas of the body
for different applications.
For example, your day could start with a jog
around the neighborhood.
Your robots would position themselves to monitor
your activity, heart rate
and respiratory status.
After your run, you settle down to a cup of
coffee and the robots assemble on your wrist,
forming a screen that displays today’s top
headlines.
At work, robots tap you on the shoulder to
alert you that an upcoming meeting is about
to begin.
We’re not there yet.
The engineers have identified challenges we
must overcome to create practical Rovables.
They include miniaturizing components, improving
pathfinding and navigation capabilities and
extending battery life.
But it could be our futures will involve being
covered by tiny, helpful,
supremely creepy robots.
Yay?
That’s all for today.
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creepy crawly things and everything else,
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