Robot garden

Can a garden filled with light-up origami robotic flowers help make coding and computer science more accessible?

Collaborators: Lindsay Sanneman, Deborah Ajilo, Ankur Mehta,
Shuhei Miyashita, Negin A. Poorheravi, Cami Ramirez,
Sehyuk Yim, Sangbae Kim, Daniela Rus

The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.

Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden is a distributed multi-robot system capable of running autonomously or with a graphical user interface.

Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-the-art rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group.

The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its education-oriented user interface.

The garden can visualize computer science concepts such as search algorithms or graph coloring, and can also act as a real-time volume meter and respond to music.

Music mode

Act as a real-time volume meter for any musical input, using distributed algorithms instead of a central controller – each tile of flowers can communicate with its orthogonal neighbors, and only one tile listens to the music

Mario Theme	Mr. Roboto
The Lion Sleeps Tonight	Break Up The Concrete

Videos by Joseph DelPreto, MIT CSAIL

Visualize graph algorithms

Using distributed algorithms instead of a central controller – each tile of flowers can communicate with its orthogonal neighbors

Breadth-first search Start from the bottom-right tile, and search for the top-center tile. First check all tiles 1 hop away from the start, then 2 hops away, and so on.	Depth-first search Start from the bottom-right tile, and search for the top-center tile. First look left as much as possible, then up as much as possible, then backtrack as needed and repeat.
Graph coloring Each tile chooses a color that is different from its neighbors.	Distance coloring Each tile chooses a color based on how far it is from the bottom-right tile.

Videos by Joseph DelPreto, MIT CSAIL

Program visual patterns

Using distributed algorithms instead of a central controller – each tile of flowers can communicate with its orthogonal neighbors

Wave: left/right	Multiple waves: left/right
Wave: up/down	Multiple waves: up/down

Videos by Joseph DelPreto, MIT CSAIL

Publications

2015

L. Sanneman, D. Ajilo, J. DelPreto, A. Mehta, S. Miyashita, N. A. Poorheravi, C. Ramirez, S. Yim, S. Kim, and D. Rus, “A distributed robot garden system,” in 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7140058
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF]

Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden presented in this paper is a distributed multi-robot system capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface. Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-the-art rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group. The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its education-oriented user interface.

@inproceedings{sanneman2015garden,
title={A distributed robot garden system},
author={Sanneman, Lindsay and Ajilo, Deborah and DelPreto, Joseph and Mehta, Ankur and Miyashita, Shuhei and Poorheravi, Negin Abdolrahim and Ramirez, Cami and Yim, Sehyuk and Kim, Sangbae and Rus, Daniela},
booktitle={2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
organization={IEEE},
year={2015},
month={May},
doi={10.1109/ICRA.2015.7140058},
ISSN={1050-4729},
url={https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/images/b/b1/2015_ICRA_Garden.pdf},
abstract={Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden presented in this paper is a distributed multi-robot system capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface. Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-the-art rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group. The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its education-oriented user interface.}
}