Gizmodo: robot chair

Todder-Sized Robotic Chairs Help Kids With Disabilities Get Around

Jason Chen — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

When a one-year-old has difficulty with movement, it impairs brain development, since researchers say babies form neural connections through exploration of their environment. How do you get around this? With a bad-ass robotic chair.

Physical therapists and mechanical engineers joined forces to create robots that allow babies with disabilities to move around. The robots controlled by a joystick that's simple enough for a one year old to use.

The chair is unlike a regular adult motorized chair, since it has sensors and a remote control feature that's usable by parents to help kids ride around. All in all, pretty awesome. [Vodpod via ABClocal]

Oki's Comfy Leopard Office Chair Has a Robot Leg at Heart

Kit Eaton — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:10:00 EST

You may have thought the Embody chair was all very high-tech...but it's got nothing on Oki's protoype Leopard chair. It's got a robot-leg in its design. Based on Oki's well-named Robot Leg walking robot, the chair is motorized: when empty it perches up in the air, waiting for your butt to settle against it. When you do so, the leg contracts and winds you backwards and down into an ideal position with "seating comfort akin to being held in someone's arms," apparently.

And when you stand up it lifts itself up behind your behind to aid you getting vertical: assistance you'll presumably need if you're so very relaxed in the chair when seated. I'm not sure how this is different from a regular hydraulic chair mount in practice, however.

Unlike the Robot Leg, which is motorized and capable of jumping, the Leopard chair utilizes the geometry of the Leg, but is unpowered. So it won't rise up and start kicking human butt when the robot revolution comes. It is made of carbon fiber, though.

Sadly this material might not make it into the final for-sale product, which Oki is hoping to release in May of 2009. [Tech-on]

RFID Robotic Chair Follows You Around For Constant Seating

Jason Chen — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Dutch designer Jelte van Geest's RFID-enabled robotic chair is for Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven, and it's fantastic. What you do is swipe your RFID-enabled library card in front of the chair's sensor, which then follows you (or your card) around the library so you always have somewhere to sit. Once you cross a line near the checkout counter, the chair returns back to its docking station to re-juice and get ready for the next guy's ass. The video after the jump illustrates how it works. [Momeld via Technabob via DVICE]

We'd totally want one of these around the house until we realized that most of our day is spent sitting on something or other anyway, so this robot would just spin around getting jealous before pitifully running out of power.

Robot Chair That Reassembles Itself

Jason Chen — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:18:34 EDT

We don't have much details on this other than it's an Interactive and Dynamic Art project, and that it's made by the members of the D'Andrea Group: Max Dean, Raffaelo D'Andrea and Matt Donovan. The chair can disassemble itself instantly, and then proceed to slowly put itself back together again. From the video, we can't tell whether it's being remotely controlled or if it has intelligence inside the chair to recognize where the pieces are. Either way, it's got a leg up on Mr. Dumpty.

D'Andrea Group Interactive & Dynamic Art [via Make]