Robotics reading assignment, week one

In addition to the required reading article from AccessScience, I read an article on a robot that was programmed to fold bath towels and an article on "Robotic Ecology" in architecture. I found the AccessScience article to be kind of dry but it was informative, and a good place to start in reading about robotics and learning about the technology. It was interesting to learn that robots can be "taught." Like how people have muscle memory, robots can be programmed to repeat an action after it has been "shown" how to perform it. This information was particularly useful and applicable to the article I read about a graduate student at University of California at Berkley and a team of his colleagues who created a robot that was programmed to fold towels. This robot was able to pick up a towel that it had never "seen" before, analyze it, and then orient it properly in order to fold it perfectly, then put it in a stack of other folded towels. While this seems like a sort of a small accomplishment, it's actually a pretty big advancement in robotic technology. Before the development of this robot, robots were only able to interact with objects that they had previously encountered. This is even more impressive because towels being soft and flexible do not hold a rigid shape, making it even harder for the robot to analyze how to fold it. Here is a video in the article (only two minutes) showing the robot (at 50x actual speed) at work:



The second article I read related to the idea of robotics in architecture. When I was searching for articles that related to my field of interest (structures) and robots, I was thinking more along the lines of how robotics could be used to construct buildings or things more along those lines. Instead, this article was about a professor at the University of Virginia who teaches a class called "Robotic Ecologies," where students discuss how robotics could affect architecture: what if the building changed shape as you walked through it? adjusted its own lighting depending on the weather? etc. The students then created models that showed their perception of robotic ecologies in architecture. Some made models that moved in order to absorb and store renewable energy sources, or a building that changed its shape depending on the wind patterns in order to be more aerodynamic. I found this article interesting because it was different then what I was expecting to read about robotics in structures... which was a nice surprise.