A desktop robot to light up your life

A desktop robot to light up your life

The clip below shows AUR - a cross between a desklamp and a robotic arm. Guy Hoffman of the Robotic Life research group in MIT's Media Lab built it as part of his PhD thesis.
He describes AUR as a "collaborative lighting assistant". A lamp that helps you out in ways that its inanimate antecedents couldn't.

Remarkably, it recently starred in a specially written play. You can see some video from the rehearsal on this page. This wasn't (only) for fun, either, as Hoffman thinks that there are parallels between acting, and designing robots:

"Both human-centric interactive robot designer and actor are in the business of injecting life into a lifeless object, be it a hierarchy of joints and motors for one, or an arc of dry dialog lines and stage directions for the other," he says. "Both robot designer and actor have to analytically break down the complex emergent constellation called 'behavior' and reconstruct it in an inherently fake, but ultimately meaningful - or at least believable - way."

A technical paper (pdf) lays out these ideas in more detail. Hoffman claims that the lamp is meant to be "non-anthropomorphic", but I don't see how. It has a vertical body with a head on top it seems to look around with. AUR can't jump yet like Pixar's animated anglepoise lamps, but it seems pretty anthropomorphic to me.

AUR is also reminiscent of Roco 'the world's first expressive computer' created by the same group at MIT. It's a regular LCD monitor mounted on a jointed arm that lets it signal disapproval if your posture is bad. Here's a video (quicktime).

Via

Tom Simonite - online technology reporter