|
|
|
Robots for Everyone!
Our Lab's Robots can be found Everywhere --- in research labs world-wide (Kilobots), in homes and schools (Root), in museums (e.g. Boston Science Museum and Cooper-Hewitt in NY), and in children's books! We have created many open-source systems to empower people of all ages to own and program robots.
THE SWARM GARDEN, Lewis Center for the Arts, CoLab, Apr 2024 (Video)
Our Swarm Architectures project is a collaboration between roboticists and civil engineers, to investigate how swarm intelligence and adaptive mechanical designs can create "Living-like" architectures that invoke nature and promote well-being. Our first demonstration is The Swarm Garden, a human-scale swarm facade consisting of a network of 35 "flower" modules that mechanically and collectively respond to light, motion, and people. We held our first public exhibit at the Lewis Arts Complex on April 9, 2024 and it was a huge success! Over 100 visitors interacted with the Swarm Garden and attended a live performance where a dancer used a wearable to improvise choreography with the swarm. We are exploring many concepts within this testbed: people-swarm interaction, adaptive shading mechanisms and facade designs, reconfigurable architecture, and the art-engineering intersection.
ROOT ROBOTICS Root Robotics has been acquired by iRobot! (2019) (iRobot ROOT Video)
Together with my two co-founders Ziv Dubrovsky and Raphael Cherney, and incubated by the Wyss Institute, we designed Root, an educational robot that drives on whiteboards with magnet+wheels, senses colors and draws under program control. Our goal: teach programming across all ages. With the same versatile robot, we can go from K-12, using a sliding framework of programming languages, starting with a blocks-based language Square for elementary school, all the way to Python for high-school and college. We can create a wide range of fun programming challenges, from learning logic through Mural and Music design, to learning AI by programming search algorithms for future Mars Explorers. You can buy Root Robots from iRobot and Amazon.
KILOBOTS (2011-2024): In addition to Root, my lab has produced other robotic systems for education outreach and interdisciplinary research. Our Kilobot swarm robots were licensed and sold by KTeam inc for a decade; over 8000 robots exist in dozens of research labs world-wide! ("kilos of robots"). You can also make your own (the hardware and software designs are open-source for non-commercial use). We also developed a web-based programming environment (kilobotics) along with a set of tutorials to make it easy to get started. Our goal was to make experimental research on collective behaviors possible across disciplines, whether the goal is to develop new engineering methods or understand biological systems synthetically. In addition to CS/robotics groups, our robots are also owned by biologists, e.g. UCSF's Center for Systems Biology (Wendell Lim) who use them for both research/education and public outreach. Sometimes they meet famous people and even appear on buses!
MUSEUM EXHIBITS: Our lab has worked with many different museums to develop temporary exhibits about the intersection of biology and technology. One of the very special exhibits was at the Boston Museum of Science, where a large scale exhibit on the NSF Robobees project was developed. This exhibit is now part of the permanent collection called "Wicked Smaht". Termes was featured at the London Science Museum and both Kilobots and Termes are part of a Travelling Exhibit called "Bugs!", that was first featured at the Museum of New Zealand and is now at the Field Museum of Chicago. Most recently Kilobots can be seen at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York.
Our Lab's Robots can be found Everywhere --- in research labs world-wide (Kilobots), in homes and schools (Root), in museums (e.g. Boston Science Museum and Cooper-Hewitt in NY), and in children's books! We have created many open-source systems to empower people of all ages to own and program robots.
THE SWARM GARDEN, Lewis Center for the Arts, CoLab, Apr 2024 (Video)
Our Swarm Architectures project is a collaboration between roboticists and civil engineers, to investigate how swarm intelligence and adaptive mechanical designs can create "Living-like" architectures that invoke nature and promote well-being. Our first demonstration is The Swarm Garden, a human-scale swarm facade consisting of a network of 35 "flower" modules that mechanically and collectively respond to light, motion, and people. We held our first public exhibit at the Lewis Arts Complex on April 9, 2024 and it was a huge success! Over 100 visitors interacted with the Swarm Garden and attended a live performance where a dancer used a wearable to improvise choreography with the swarm. We are exploring many concepts within this testbed: people-swarm interaction, adaptive shading mechanisms and facade designs, reconfigurable architecture, and the art-engineering intersection.
ROOT ROBOTICS Root Robotics has been acquired by iRobot! (2019) (iRobot ROOT Video)
Together with my two co-founders Ziv Dubrovsky and Raphael Cherney, and incubated by the Wyss Institute, we designed Root, an educational robot that drives on whiteboards with magnet+wheels, senses colors and draws under program control. Our goal: teach programming across all ages. With the same versatile robot, we can go from K-12, using a sliding framework of programming languages, starting with a blocks-based language Square for elementary school, all the way to Python for high-school and college. We can create a wide range of fun programming challenges, from learning logic through Mural and Music design, to learning AI by programming search algorithms for future Mars Explorers. You can buy Root Robots from iRobot and Amazon.
KILOBOTS (2011-2024): In addition to Root, my lab has produced other robotic systems for education outreach and interdisciplinary research. Our Kilobot swarm robots were licensed and sold by KTeam inc for a decade; over 8000 robots exist in dozens of research labs world-wide! ("kilos of robots"). You can also make your own (the hardware and software designs are open-source for non-commercial use). We also developed a web-based programming environment (kilobotics) along with a set of tutorials to make it easy to get started. Our goal was to make experimental research on collective behaviors possible across disciplines, whether the goal is to develop new engineering methods or understand biological systems synthetically. In addition to CS/robotics groups, our robots are also owned by biologists, e.g. UCSF's Center for Systems Biology (Wendell Lim) who use them for both research/education and public outreach. Sometimes they meet famous people and even appear on buses!
MUSEUM EXHIBITS: Our lab has worked with many different museums to develop temporary exhibits about the intersection of biology and technology. One of the very special exhibits was at the Boston Museum of Science, where a large scale exhibit on the NSF Robobees project was developed. This exhibit is now part of the permanent collection called "Wicked Smaht". Termes was featured at the London Science Museum and both Kilobots and Termes are part of a Travelling Exhibit called "Bugs!", that was first featured at the Museum of New Zealand and is now at the Field Museum of Chicago. Most recently Kilobots can be seen at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York.
|
Lewis Center for the Arts, 2024
BUGS Exhibit, at California Academy of Sciences
Boston Museum of Science, "Wicked Smaht" Exhibit
|