Who doesn’t love a trip to Ikea? (10 hours and 5 plates of Swedish meatballs later… nobody.) Yes, while you’re browsing through the warehouse munching on those delicious café goods, you may want to take every piece of furniture home, but once the shopping high ends you’re faced with the agony of assembling and arranging everything you didn’t go there to buy. Wouldn’t it be great if there was something that did all that for you? ASMBLD aims to make those dreams come true. Project Dom Indoors is a robotic system that reconfigures a room within minutes. Sound too good to be true? Well, here’s how they plan to make it happen.
The system is made up of a floor of five-inch tiles and aluminum studs that are fit to the layout of the room. The little bots are housed inside, where they build the cubes one layer at a time, move them into location and lift them into place. Once one layer is in place, the lifting robots push them up and hold the layer until the other bots place new cube underneath it. This is repeated until the structure is complete or reversed to disassemble an existing structure. The robots know where to go by using light sensors and markers on the surface. What’s even better is the bots are battery powered and charge themselves via a dock (think of a Roomba). Users can program the system from their smartphones for an added convenience–leave the house with it looking one way, come hoe to it looking another.
These robots are not only efficient, but intelligent as well. If they sense something above that’s too heavy, it will alarm the entire system to stop moving to prevent any safety hazards. If a robot happens to break during building, the system can find the exact location of the bot to easily remove it or repair it.
The developers describe the system as “Minecraft made real.” Great, so what’s the price? While there are no set prices, ASMBLD reports a 500 square foot room would cost around $12,000 to install. While that sounds like a hefty sum, they believe it will save more money by reducing labor and material costs (plus repeated furniture store trips and meatball consumption), not to mention all the aspects of constructions the little bots take care of themselves.
“When you’re building a building, there’s coordination, you can’t have the framer, the plumber, the electrician and all of the different contractors working at the same time,” says Bruno Araujo, ASMBLD’s robotics engineer. “These robots are doing everything at the same time so when you have the structure built, you don’t just have walls, you have electrical conduits, lights, and outlets.”
Now, before you run off to plan a system for yourself, keep in mind the system isn’t quite ready for daily reconfiguration activity. However, the developers are certain weekly or monthly reconfigurations are completely doable. So, if you want that fully automated home and every bit of your living quarters to look like a Turkish bathhouse, this is certainly for you.
