The flexing room architectural robot: An actuated active-bending robotic structure using human feedback

Abstract

Advances in autonomous control of object-scale robots, both anthropomorphic and vehicular, are posing new human–machine interface challenges. In architecture, very few examples of autonomous inhabitable robotic architecture exist. A number of factors likely contribute to this condition, among them the scale and cost of architectural adaptive systems, but on a more fundamental conceptual level also the questions of how architectural robots would communicate with their human inhabitants. The Flexing Room installation is a room-sized actuated active-bending skeleton structure. It uses rudimentary social feedback by counting people to inform its behavior in the form of actuated poses of the room enclosure. An operational full-scale prototype was constructed and tested. To operate it no geometric-based simulation was used; the only communication between computer and structure was in sending values for the air pressure settings and in gathering sensor feedback. The structure’s physical state was resolved through the embodied computation of its interconnected parts, and the people-counting sensor feedback influences its next action. Future work will explore the development of learning processes to improve the human–machine coexistence in space.