Interactive Mobile Robotic Drinking Glasses

The central idea behind this attempt is to merge common objects and robotics to obtain a new type of interactive artefact, we call robjects. Robjects provide services to everyday life and can be controlled by the user in a very intuitive way. Robjects take rarely the initiative, have few decisional autonomy. Most of their activity is centered and controlled by the interaction with the user. To test this concept in a concrete experimentwe decided to include mobile robotic technology into drinking glasses to improve their service on a table. Making them mobile and interactive brings a new dimension to the table, simplifies service and improves security. The system works in the following manner : when a user starts filling a glass, the other empty glasses come closer to get filled too and then go back to their initial position. Owners of the glasses can refuse to fill their glasses by simply bringing back the glass on its initial position as soon as the glass starts to move. The system has been prototyped and tested. The analysis of the interaction of some users shows strengths in interactivity and weaknesses in the speed of the system and in reliability of the actual prototype.