- All together now, DANCE! (Image: Disney Research)
- dn25401-1_300[1].jpg (6.84 KiB) Viewed 2330 times
Now's your chance to make other Earthlings quail. Platoons of palm-sized glowing robots stand ready to obey your every gesture.
Built by Javier Alonso-Mora of Disney Research in Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues, these dayglo "pixelbots" scurry along the ground in swarms coordinated by someone using a tablet or a gesture-sensing camera.
A camera looks down on the flock of robots and feeds data on their formation into a computer. With input from a tablet running a drawing app, or from a depth-sensing camera that discerns your gestures, you are away. Your commands are translated by an algorithm and transmitted wirelessly to the swarm.
Simply drawing with your finger on the tablet sends the army of pixelbots skittering to align. Or, if you are using the gesture sensor, you can lift your arms up and down, for instance, and the drones will arrange themselves into a colourful stick man that does likewise, moving with you.
The swarm is self-repairing as well as self-organising. Take away a drone or two and the others quickly move to restore the overall shape, by either fitting in the drones elsewhere (assuming you release them from your grasp), or making a shape that can do without them.
The long-term aim of the research is to help people coordinate the activity of swarms of robots that perform inspections in industrial settings. But they could also help in search and rescue surveillance and in implementing collision avoidance for driverless car fleets.
In the shorter term they have a distinct entertainment potential.
"The goal is to return the feeling of magic to displays," says team leader Paul Beardsley. "When cinema was invented, people fled the cinema in shock when the Lumière Brothers showed L'Arrivee d'un Train. But now of course we are accustomed and blasé about HD screens and projections. By using robots to make images, and supporting interaction, we hope to add a level of physical engagement which has been lost in familiar types of displays."
The work was presented last month at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Bielefeld, Germany.