OATs is a small add-on device that gives everyday objects expressive characters based on sensor readings. On the researchers' project page, an office refrigerator gets bored when unused, while a space heater becomes frustrated when it heats an empty or overly warm room.
Users describe the object and select sensors such as temperature, motion and light to set up its character and behaviors. The project comes from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Smart devices were supposed to make life easier. Now we may need to keep the refrigerator entertained.
A door sensor uses crushed garlic peel and plastic to generate an electrical signal as the door opens. When the layers touch and separate, static electricity is produced. A two-sided garlic-peel version generated about 400 volts at very low current.
Researchers Deepak Bharti and Manas Tiwari at Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur demonstrated a home-security system that alerts a smartphone when the door opens, detecting openings with 92% accuracy across 50 tests. The sensing element needs no external power, although the microcontroller transmitting the alert used a power bank.
A home-security sensor relies on the peel of a garlic clove. Kitchen scraps have found a new job guarding the door.
Researchers at the University of Waikato deliberately built a robot called Spike using traits that previous research associated with creepiness: an appearance that is hard to classify as human, animal or machine, plus spikes, unusual facial features, dark colors and unpredictable motion.
They showed Spike to 104 participants. Some described it as angry or unsettling, while others thought it was cool or even cute. The team concluded that there may be no universally creepy robot because perceptions vary strongly between people.
They deliberately combined features meant to make a robot creepy, and some people still called it cute. Apparently even engineered creepiness has a target-audience problem.
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab taught a robotic hand to use its five fingers as legs and locomote on its own. It moved untethered across 14 surfaces, recovered from falls, and supported its own weight while pressing keyboard arrow keys, scoring 29 correct presses out of 32.
The experiments used an off-the-shelf WUJI hand fitted with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, IMU and battery, with control policies trained in Isaac Lab and transferred to the physical system.
Give a robot hand mobility and suddenly the hand itself walks over and starts using the keyboard. It has become its own little creature.
Making a robot feel alive is not only about faces or voices; whole-body motion can matter too. MOFU (MOrphing Fluffy Unit) explores that idea with a fluffy spherical body that expands and contracts. Developed by researchers at the University of Electro-Communications, it uses a Jitterbug geometric structure and a single linear actuator to change its height from roughly 210 mm to 280 mm.
In user studies, adding whole-body expansion, contraction and rotation made the robot seem more animate than locomotion alone. Rather than relying on a face, MOFU uses the rhythm of its entire body to suggest life.
Before giving the robot a face, they basically said “let's make the whole body breathe.” The fluffiness makes that strangely convincing.
A soft robot has been developed that, under infrared light, twists to store energy, kicks itself off the surface, lands and resets its shape on its own. The NC State University design uses a teardrop-shaped liquid crystal elastomer.
As long as the light continues, it repeats a cycle resembling charge → jump → reset. Adjusting the tail angle changes whether it crawls, jumps forward or hops nearly straight upward.
The energy cycle is beautifully engineered, while the result looks like a mysterious desk object that occasionally remembers to jump. Hard not to watch.
Smart devices were supposed to make life easier. Now we may need to keep the refrigerator entertained.