Robot in the Garden: Preliminary Experiments Programming an On-site Robot Ball Assistant to the Landscape Architect

Abstract

<p>The project features preliminary experiments programming a small autonomous robot ball known as the SPRK+ Sphero that explore the utility of an onsite robotic “assistant” to the landscape architect, and ask the following research questions: i. What useful work can an interactive robot ball offer a landscape architect on site? ii. What would an initial prototype implementation look like? First results include exploratory implementations using the OVAL SDK for Sphero for calculations of position, distance, collision, and by extension, slope and area. The project is innovative in three respects: 1) It uses an off-the-shelf handheld, low cost robotic toy as a first experimental implementation, 2) It identifies characteristics of an on-site robotic assistant that would make it useful to the landscape architect, and 3) It defines for implementation key initial starting tasks that the robot ball could perform. Several short demo videos showcasing our first results accompany the paper.</p>