14 DAY TRIAL // Japanese gardens are meant to help recreate your eyes and foster contemplation and meditation, and there are special lamps designed to help with that. And, now, there are robots that can help with that too.
Called Toro-bots, they are actually a combination between Japanese garden lamps and the PhantomX quadruped robots from Trossen Robotics.
Obviously, making it possible for the lamps to walk under their own power was one of the primary goals of the project.
However, the head of the project, Alvaro Cassinelli, wanted there to be more to his inventions than locomotion.
After all, the whole idea of Japanese gardens is to feel one with nature. So while a lot of human work does go into them, it's aimed at preserving the natural feel, not altering it.
Obviously, robots don't exactly fit in in that regard, so the designer had to pour more effort than usual into making the Toro-bots become a part of the order of such a place.
Ultimately, they are meant to enable the existence of gardens that can rework themselves, change according to season and the mood of those walking into them.
Because while the gardens do emulate nature, they are ultimately man-made and preserved, so it's man that establishes the order there.
So what can these robots do exactly, you might ask. Well, for one they can, obviously, move around according to signals sent from a remote control.
They can do more though, like act according to a behavior programed into their integrated circuitry. This lets them react to people who walk by, enhancing the light or moving out of the way, thus possibly scaring the living lights out of them in the process.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of recreational, peaceful corners of nature, but we suppose it would be visitors' own fault for not reading the sign that would say “garden that takes care of itself via qudruped lamps.”
Jokes aside, though, it was really just a matter of time before robotics started to make its way into applications such as this. Toro-bots with the ability to, say, follow you around at night and monitor plant health or control the sprinklers, could do a lot of good.
You can build your own Toro-bot from a Japanese lamp and a PhantomX quadruped kit that costs ~$1,000 / €730. Right now, they only have infrared beacons that allow them to be individually tracked, but eventually, it should be possible to install a centralized, autonomous control of some sort.