Forget IKEA flat-pack furniture think Roombots, modular robots to be used as building blocks for furniture that assembles itself, that can change shape over time - a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa. Furniture that moves using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules create a static structure such as a wall or a box.
Roombots are the robotics vision of researchers at the Biorobotics Lab, EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The project is funded by the Locomorph project and the Swiss National Center of Competence of Research in Robotics (NCCR). Preliminary studied were also funded by Microsoft Research Cambridge and EPFL.
