Robots Are Coming For Our Gardens

Gardening is so last-gen. Sure, you might be able to prune your way to a more beautiful backyard (or rooftop, if you live in Brooklyn). But who has a manageable enough schedule to really pull that off these days? By the time you're done sowing your artisanal seeds, the seasons have probably already changed. Wouldn't it be easier if your garden could just move with you, so to speak?

Enter robots. "Toro-bots," to be specific. Alvaro Cassinelli, an artist and assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, recently rigged up a series of Japanese-style lanterns on top of PhantomX quadrupeds. But these aren't your standard, mildly interactive lanterns that can only be turned on or off. As Cassinelli shows in this delightful video of the squat little critters scampering around like something out of a Miyazaki film, each of the walking lamps is programmed to function both on an individual and collective level.

The little bots are equipped with infrared rangefinders that give the bots a sense of spatial awareness, thus allowing them guide their movements based their position to one another and other objects in the environment. Each has an infrared sensor affixed to its top as well, so they can be monitored remotely. And they're all connected to a central network that Cassinelli operates through his iPad in the video, which enables them to work in unison.

As with the enterprise-level robots being developed for warehouses and manufacturing duties, Cassinelli faces a creative and technical challenge here of teaching the robots how to best collaborate in a way that's both safe and effective. He faces another hurdle that's not as much of a concern for robots working in industrial facilities, however: the Toro-bots have to be able to integrate into the mindset and aesthetic of a garden—not exactly a hurly-burly place.

"A Japanese garden is designed to recreate the eyes and foster contemplation and meditation," Cassinelli wrote in his description of the Toro-bots video. "Inspired by nature, it is, however, a work of art: a production of the human mind. Human beings create that order, and then retreat to contemplate it, intervening from time to time to tweak details and maintain the order."

Ultimately, he wants the Toro-bots to be part of "a garden that takes care of itself, that somehow understands and re-interprets the rules of harmony and equilibrium, and reconfigures itself depending on the season, the presence or absence of a human observers—that develops structure in a generative way, creating a dynamic conversation between the elements in the garden."

Given that the chief asset many see in robots is their ability to speed things up (the production and distribution of goods, management of specific tasks, etc.), it's nice to see someone using them to help slow us down instead.