“Furniture that changes functionality completely depending on the needs of the person…” Like life-size LEGO pieces, these robot modules can gyrate and reconfigure in order to create furniture or move furniture in an assistive capacity for people with physical impairments. From the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, watch how Roombots work above.
These supercool problem solving modules reminded us a lot of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab‘s jumping and self-assembling M-Blocks:
Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other.
In the archives: Magnetically Actuated Micro-Robots and this snake robot.
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