Home Is Where You Hang Out With Your Robot

Article by Kit Eaton
From FastCompany.com

Bot Futures: Robots That Decorate, Then Tidy Your House Better Than You Do

A recurring theme here in TWiB is the idea that robots will soon help you do much more in your home than vacuum your floors or perhaps mop your kitchen. There are perhaps some good reasons for this–starting with the old notion that housework is a chore, and the newer one showing that consumers are now used to spending more money on items like Dyson equipment. Home-assistance robots may seem a long way off, but that doesn’t mean progress toward more robot involvement in your home is a dream.

Check out the skills of the Robofold and Artaic systems, because these devices may just help decorate your home of the near future. Robofold’s clever robot grips can take a 3D object designed in a standard desktop software system and bend and fold sheets of metal to conform to the design–replicating all sorts of items from sculptures to furniture to structural panels for displays. By doing so over and over, they can create composite objects that would just be too time-consuming to make by hand.

Meanwhile Artaic’s robots are a variation on the pick-and-place robots that find great use on electronic device production lines, only in this case they’re used for a more aesthetically-pleasing output: Manufacturing detailed mosaics. Essentially a simple task for the robot, and a very time-consuming and expensive one for human artisans, the device can rapidly assemble individual tiles that make up custom mosaic installations in a fraction of the time (and labor expense) that would otherwise be needed.

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