Lightweight prototyping with robot pseudopods
Channel: Scott Davidoff
Date: 2016-10-24

The complexities and costs of deploying Internet of Things (IoT) and ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) applications seriously compromise our ability to evaluate such systems in the real world. To simplify Ubicomp deployment, this video introduces the robotic pseudopod, an actuator that acts on mechanical switches originally designed for human control.

Robotic pseudopods enable computational control of devices by hijacking their mechanical switches – a term we refer to as mechanical hijacking. Pseudopods offer simple, low-cost, non-destructive computational access to installed hardware, enabling functional, real world ubicomp deployments.

This short video illustrates how three primitives, built with the Lego MindStorm NXT toolkit, can implement mechanical hijacking, facilitating real world ubicomp deployments which otherwise require extensive changes to existing hardware or infrastructure.

This project was done in collaboration with Microsoft Research --
Nicolas Villar, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/nvillar/
Alex S. Taylor, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ecxxlucAAAAJ
Shahram Izadi, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hkCVqYkAAAAJ