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

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2017-01-01
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Westort, Caroline
Shen, Zhongzhe
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Westort, Caroline
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Landscape Architecture
Landscape Architecture is an environmental design discipline. Landscape architects actively shape the human environment: they map, interpret, imagine, draw, build, conceptualize, synthesize, and project ideas that transform landscapes. The design process involves creative expression that derives from an understanding of the context of site (or landscape) ecosystems, cultural frameworks, functional systems, and social dynamics. Students in our program learn to change the world around them by re-imagining and re-shaping the landscape to enhance its aesthetic and functional dimensions, ecological health, cultural significance, and social relevance. The Department of Landscape Architecture was established as a department in the Division of Agriculture in 1929. In 1975, the department's name was changed to the Department of Landscape Architecture and Community Planning. In 1978, community planning was spun off from the department, and the Department of Landscape Architecture became part of the newly established College of Design. Dates of Existence: 1929–present
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Abstract

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.

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The following article was published in Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture (2017) pp. 223-234, doi:10.14627/537629023. Posted with permission.

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Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2017
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