Roombots Want to Be All the Furniture You'll Ever Need

In the future, the only furniture you'll need will be a bunch of little robots, which will team up to make you whatever you desire

2 min read

Roombots
Image: Biorobotics Laboratory/EPFL

Having lots of furniture is a terribly inefficient way to live, considering that most of your furniture is not actually in use most of the time. A much better way to do it would be to just have one single piece of furniture that manages to be, say, a chair, a table, and a bed whenever you need it to be. You know, like my couch. But if you need more specific functionality, you may soon be able to get it using Roombots, little modular robots that can configure themselves into all kinds of different objects.

One Roombot is a fairly simple (and therefore relatively cheap) modular robot with lots of connectors and a hinge in the middle. By itself, it's not good for much, but when it gets together with a bunch of its friends, they can autonomously combine to turn themselves into all sorts of different pieces of furniture. They'd be able to move around on command, and when you don't need them anymore, they'd stack themselves neatly against the wall.

In a hypothetical near future, I can see myself getting out of bed in the morning and taking a shower. My bed, meanwhile, turns itself into a breakfast table and chair. After I eat, the table turns into a desk, but I decide I'd rather work on the couch today, so it turns into a couch instead. Each piece of furniture would be infinitely flexible, too, so I could ask my desk to reposition itself higher or lower and it would obey, or I could even ask for a bit more space and some extra bots would come over and stick themselves on to augment the desktop.

This stuff sounds pretty far out, but it's not too terribly complicated. This is one of the big advantages of modular robotics: lots of simple robots with clever programming can get together and team up to do complex tasks, like building me a couch with an integrated desk that I'll never, ever have to move from.

Images and video: Biorobotics Laboratory/EPFL

[ EPFL Biorob ]

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