The House that Roomba built

Abstract

The "Roomba House" (RH) is a novel generative design approach based on robotic interaction with the physical environment in order to inductively identify design opportunities for improving the design of future robot-inclusive spaces and furniture. The paper presents the theoretical and technological details of this approach, an empirical study of a cleaning robot and sample results from an evolutionary system inspired by heuristics inductively derived from the study. RH is an informed provocation based on the recognition that increasingly widespread domestic robots that roam our living spaces will infer key features and help produce creative design solutions that maintain or improve user requirements while improving their inclusiveness in everyday life. © 2014, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.