Shady Robot Brings The Shade Just Where You Need It
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 11 of December , 2009 at 12:28 am
This is just great. .. Daniela Rus’s laboratory at MIT is in a Frank Gehry-designed building that’s covered with giant windows and shiny metal, which is a bad combination when it’s sunny out and you’re trying to see your computer monitor. Custom window shades would have been too expensive, so instead, in 2007 members of the lab just built themselves a robot called Shady:
Directed via Bluetooth, Shady autonomously climbs up the truss system supporting the windows and unfolds a shade to block just that little spot of sun that it needs to. Researchers suggest that robots using Shady’s movement technique might be good for clambering around construction scaffolding or power line towers, and they’ve started simulating MultiShady, which combines a bunch of cooperating Shady bots with passive bars. Couple enough of these together, and you can make all kinds of self assembling and dynamically reconfigurable structures, and even GIANT ROBOT TRUSS PEOPLE:
Watch it dance by clicking here.
[ Shady ] and [ MultiShady ] VIA [ IEEE ]
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