It is still in the early stages but smart, ‘roomboots’ the self-assembling robotic furniture, with adaptive functionally adjusting to your specific needs.
How amazing it will be if you can just snap your fingers or issue a verbal command for a table, a chair or any other furniture to assemble right in front of you. Can you imagine? That the chair you’re sitting on became a sofa on demand as the day moved from light to dark. Or if all your furnishings could move out of your way as you walk through a room.
We’re still a long way from owning furniture that transforms as easily as Optimums Prime, but a group of researchers from the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EFPL) in Switzerland have created a group of modular shape-changing robots called Roombots that are 3D reconfigurable, meaning they can change shapes and in this case, would become adaptive furniture.
Modular robots are robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and detach. Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Compared to “monolithic” robots, modular robots offer higher versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the possibility of self-reconfiguration. The type of scenario that we envision is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and tables, depending on user requirements. This 
furniture will change shape over time (e.g. a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations depending on the user’s needs. When not needed, the group of modules can create a static structure such as a wall or a box. Our dream is to provide multi-functional modules that are merged with the furniture and that lay users and engineers can combine for multiple applications.
“It’s a bit of a science-fiction project in my lab to create intelligent furniture which can change shape and functionality,” explains lab director Auke Ijspeert. “We envisage the Roombots moving and combining to create a diversity of elements including tables and chairs.” The goal is to create furniture that can be re-used in multiple ways.
Designs would consist of Roombot modules — which resemble two dice stuck together, and contain a battery, three motors for movements and pivoting, and a wireless connection. Each module is just 22cm long and the team imagines just 10 of them could combine to build a broad range of furniture. “The Roombots would be coupled with more passive materials such as a table top or cushion to create the end results,” says Ijspeert.
The team is now experimenting with different ways to control the furniture, using tablet computers, or speech or gesture recognition. In the case of an elderly person, the robots might have more autonomy, Vespignani said. But don’t worry, “I don’t envision a scenario where the robots are completely autonomous,” he said.
The Roombots are still a proof of concept. Vespignani says it’ll probably take decades before the mechanical capabilities of the robots catch up with the computational capabilities.”What I really hope is to provide Lego blocks for people to find their own use such as artists or designers,” says Ijspeert.
Roombots: Self-organizing Robotic Furniture
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