Ikea Robotics

Too tired to pull up a chair? One day, that chair may come to you.

“IKEA Robotics,” developed by NYU ITP student Adam Lassy, is a conceptual study on changing environments using IKEA furniture. For the ITP spring show, Lassy modified a table and chair to create mobile, wireless robots that can reconfigure an interior space in response to people in the room.

“The project began as an exploration of dynamic architecture,” says Lassy. “But evolved into a study of how it would feel to have furniture in our homes that had its own life. I’m very interested in this idea of networked objects, things in your home that use an internet connection in new ways, rather than a laptop as a person’s sole interface.”

Lassy also admits that being an 80s child spurred a lifelong fascination with a future filled with servile, household robots.

He chose Ikea because of its “somewhat culture-less design,”its sturdy engineering and cheap cost: “It is somewhat valueless after a person is done using it,”  he says. “So I have no qualms with cutting it apart and shoving a bunch of electronics into it.”  The hollow structure of many of the pieces makes Ikea furniture very amenable to structural modification.

Various interaction tests were performed using an overhead camera to track people in a room and move furniture towards and around them. Additionally, proximity sensors and single button inputs on the furniture were used to react to user presence.

Lassy has a computer science degree from University of California at San Diego  and has worked mostly as a computer programmer building websites for ad companies. He attended an architecture masters program briefly, before deciding he didn’t want to design “static things.”

Lassy imagines an entirely robotic, reconfigurable living space dependent on people’s needs; whether for eating, entertaining or working. He continues to update the software to make the furniture’s interaction with people more robust and process oriented, and in the future the space could be controlled using traditional interfaces like an iPhone or audible voice commands.

Now, if only we could get a robot chef to make us dinner to go on our robotic table that we’ll cruise up to on our robotic chairs. The future is looking… futuristic.

As first seen on PSFK.