Pixar’s infamous Luxor Jr. short was the inspiration behind an exciting new project. While it doesn’t appear to be interested in jumping on any beach balls, the Pinokio project has created a robotic lamp with a curious personality.
Unlike those coin boxes where the robotic arm reaches out and snatches the quarter, or the always hilarious useless switch box, Lamp was created to interact with everything in the world around it. When a person interacts with Lamp, it moves and tries to play with you. If you disappear suddenly, it tries to figure out why. Lamp appears to be curious, playful, and makes you want to believe it is alive. Giving the gift of life to a lamp isn’t a small task, in fact the designers thoroughly explain all of the custom hardware and programming that went into getting this far.
From the base, every part of Lamp can move. Inside the head alone there a camera and microphone with a mechanical iris to control how much light came through the bulb, as well as give a blinking eye feel. Three servos are mounted to the head to allow the entire head to move fluidly. The gearbox powered by an Arduino allows Lamp 190 degrees of movement, all tucked inside the base. The hinges, support beams, and the actual lamp with the camera embedded were all custom made either with machined aluminum, steel, or 3D printed.
Using OpenCV, the team was able to program Lamp to respond to environmental changes as though it could see. In his project notes, one of the developers notes that he feels they may have only scratched the surface when it comes to the kinds of things Lamp could be capable of responding to. While the video and the project descriptions offer great insight into how robotics are being viewed today from a creative standpoint, it is also important to recognize the practical applications. Having a desk lamp that knows you need more light in a certain area and simply moves automatically to provide it could be incredibly useful to a lot of people.
Project Pinokio is a great step forward in demonstrating the kind of things that creative people can achieve today. The limitations of the past, especially now that 3D printers are becoming more affordable and Arduino development groups are so common, are simply no longer barriers.
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