Friday, November 23, 2007

Glowbots

Glowbots are small wheel-based robots, which communicates with each other and visually presents this as animated light patterns. The emerging patterns can be encouraged or discouraged by shaking the robots. The concept of Glowbots was initially inspired by the interests and experiences found among people that has lizards, spiders and snakes as pets. From interviews we found that such pets involve a different experience and relation, than what owning a dog or a cat does. Some expressed their pets as a hobby of breeding lizards with interesting patterns, without being interested in different personalities. Such findings were investigated as inspiration for these robots. The concept has now been technically implemented on a robotic platform called E-puck. Glowbots have been presented at Siggraph'07, Wired Next Fest'07 and will appear as a video at HRI'08. Furthermore, they have appeared in media such as Discovery news, and the New Scientist blog.

Glowbots project website