Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The way that many of us work has shifted more towards remote and hybrid models in the past few years. Considering the positive impacts these changes have had on employee satisfaction, and the reductions seen in facilities and maintenance expenses, this trend may be with us for quite some time. In fact, 74% of Fortune 500 CEOs recently surveyed said that they have plans to reduce the size of their office spaces. One consequence of this reduction in office space is that we will need to learn to do more with less. Spaces will need to be made more flexible so that they can adapt to the needs of the moment.

In the past, robotic furniture like tables and display screens have been developed in an effort to fill this need. Unfortunately, these types of devices are limited in the types of situations that they can accommodate, and they are not suited to room-scale reconfigurations of an entire office space. Floor-anchored and wheeled partitions have also been employed to dynamically alter a workspace with some success, but they lack flexibility in the types of interactions that they can support, and moreover, moving these heavy partitions can be quite impractical. Engineers at Tohoku University in Japan have improved upon traditional partitioning systems with a new robotic, room-scale system that they call WaddleWalls. WaddleWalls consists of a swarm of vertically stretchable robotic partitions that users can instruct to automatically reconfigure a workspace in a highly flexible manner.

The hardware for the build starts with a Roomba Create 2 robot serving as the base and providing the platform that enables the partition to move around a room. An off-the-shelf roll-up screen acts as the partition and is attached to a 3D-printed pole positioned on top of the Roomba. A DC motor is included to adjust the height of the partition by manipulating the roll-up screen. An ESP32 microcontroller carries out requests to move or adjust the partition, and a VIVE Tracker at the top listens for requests that users make with a VIVE Controller device. For the proof of concept, the team constructed four such robotic partitions.

To move a partition, a user points to it with the VIVE Controller, then specifies where they want it to move by pointing to the new location and pressing a trigger button. It is also possible for preset configurations to be recorded and recalled to quickly arrange a room into commonly used configurations. Since there are multiple robots changing position at any given time, the team built in a collision avoidance system to prevent any mishaps.

A small user evaluation study was conducted to assess how well WaddleWalls works under real world scenarios. In particular, interactive partitioning, height-changing, and automatic preset partitioning were explored. These tasks were also performed with traditional, wheeled partitions for comparison. Overall, it was found that users significantly preferred WaddleWalls over existing partitioning systems. It was noted that the new system required much less physical effort to reconfigure, and it also simplified the planning process when changing the layout of a space.

Next up, the team is planning to explore how WaddleWalls can be used effectively in larger workspaces. They also want to look for synergies between their system and robotic furniture to create more fully automated workplaces. Looking further down the road, they also see opportunities to use WaddleWalls for other purposes, like an automated sun shield or a recreational badminton net. But before many of these use cases will become practical, they will need to find a way to reduce the cost of the system.