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Do robots need their own furniture?

A project log for Reactron Overdrive

A small but critical number of minimally complex machines interact with each other, providing machine augmentation of human activity.

kenji-larsenKenji Larsen 06/25/2014 at 16:520 Comments

I think the answer is yes.

The furniture we have in our homes are anti-gravity devices such as tables and chairs, or organizational devices such as cabinets and desks.

If you have a machine culture in your house, and the robotic units are doing things among themselves, which include moving stuff around, then at minimum they will need transfer stations.  These can be as simple as little, out-of-the-way tables, or something more complex.

I envision the need for mobile robots to require a recharging station that they can get to and manage on their own.

There may be the need for organized temporary storage (material buffering).

It may well be that all of these robotic needs can come together in one piece of furniture - a small footprint, height-adjusting table to facilitate material transfer to different conveyances, with cabinetry below, and a charging port (or several) for robots to charge up along their travels, if necessary.  There may be the case for a precision location beacon, to augment other tracking methods.  If this robot furniture is designed to be stationary, it can be a positional reference for triangulation for any moving objects, including organic ones.

At what point is this piece of furniture just another robot, albeit a stationary one?  I don't know.  Perhaps it is more properly called an appliance, like an oven or dishwasher, which are machines that don't change location.  But the table-like and organizational aspects seem more like furniture - just not for humans.  And since we would be seeing these items, but not actively interacting with them the way we do with an oven or dishwasher, they should be good looking and innocuous, more like furniture than an appliance.  Perhaps a new designation is appropriate.

This piece of furniture might be a good place to put the ubiquitous Integron unit, as well.

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