User Designer

To those of you who voted in the poll about HCI tutorials, thank you. To those who didn’t bother (there’s still time) I mutter a future curse: May all your solar panels develop self-awareness and go on strike.

Anyhow, previously I touched upon the idea of objects and tools that enable us to more easily create physical objects (How To Make (almost) Anything), or allow us to more easily reshape existing objects (Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me). In both cases we do the creating and reshaping, we give objects their physical structure, we are the shapers.

How can the physical structure of an object or artifact reshape itself?

Imagine while drinking a coffee you rush out the door to catch a bus. As you run to the bus stop the coffee cup changes into a sealed heat preserving flat container that easily slips into your back pocket. No more splashing coffee everywhere and your coffee is still hot. Then while standing in the packed bus the flat coffee container runs a straw from your pocket to your mouth so you can continue drinking coffee.

If a smart self-reshaping cup is going to be possible we need malleable materials that can change shape anytime we want. Or even better, they change shape when they realise that’d make life easier, e.g. your soup spoon turns into a straw so you can suck up the last drops from a bowl of soup. These kinds of self-reshaping and self-assembling materials are commonly envisioned as the result of nanotechnology research and development.

Now have a look at this video showing a shaping-shifting robot forming from a magnetic swarm (New Scientist article). The research into programmable material shown in the video is part of Carnegie Mellon and Intel’s Claytronics project. Neat ain’t it - yep, its still a young research area but online you can find a bucket load of research into self-reconfiguring modular robots. If the robots where made small enough then millions of them working together could become self-reshaping materials.

Xerox PARC’s Lattice is another example of interesting early stage research into modular robots for smart materials (esp. Proteo). If you have a chance play around with the Proteo RDSim (Rhombic Dodecahedron Self-Reconfiguration Simulator). The researchers who created the simulator were trying out different techniques for enabling lots of small robots to form themselves into different shapes.

To play with the simulator your web browser needs to run Java. When the simulator loads click on “New Goal”, then select “Disk”, set the Radius to 4, click “OK”, then click “Start Run”. In the main area you’ll see a flat disk form out of the white cubes. The white wireframe is the target shape the cubes are to self-organise into. If you’re feeling brave you can new try another “New Goal” of a Cup, try with a Radius of 6.

Another more recent simulator, which I haven’t tried yet, is DPRSim: the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator from Intel Research. DPRSim is a platform on which Researchers can develop and test new distributed algorithms for large ensembles of Catoms. Catoms are tiny robots with no moving parts that have internal computation and magnetic actuation.

Finally, if you want a quick review of previous modular robot research have a read of the review paper Design of a Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot.