{{no footnotes, date=October 2011 The Cyberflora project is a project developed by the Media Lab at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. The project is part of the Anima Machina program at MIT - a program that was developed by Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director of the Robotic Life Group

Cynthia Breazeal Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Her most recent work has focus ...

. The Cyberflora project allowed Breazeal and students involved in the media lab to investigate

emotional intelligence Emotional intelligence (EI) is most often defined as the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions. People with high emotional intelligence can recognize their own emotions and those of others, use emotional information ...

in a breed of robots that combines both plant and animal characteristics.

The Garden

Breazeal's mechanical flower garden is composed of four "species" of robotic flora. Each species is an amalgamation of animal-like conduct and flower-like attributes that is put into a robotic representation that is fully aware of its surrounding environment and can respond to stimuli in a "life-like and distinct manner." Electromechanical systems hidden within the flowers' shells "allow petals to open and close and tentacles to reach or retreat in response to human movement." Soft music, varied throughout the exhibit, is played in the background as people interact with flora. The flowers in the garden use technologies such as

capacitive sensing In electrical engineering, capacitive sensing (sometimes capacitance sensing) is a technology, based on capacitive coupling, that can detect and measure anything that is conductive or has a dielectric constant different from air. Many types of sen ...

and

thermal sensors A thermal column (or thermal) is a rising mass of buoyant air, a convective current in the atmosphere, that transfers heat energy vertically. Thermals are created by the uneven heating of Earth's surface from solar radiation, and are an example ...

to react to human hands and bodies elsewhere in the room.

Design team

- Project lead
Jeff Lieberman
- Design lead *Ryan Kavanaugh - Graphic design *Heather Knight - Undergraduate *Blake Brasher - Undergraduate *Dan McAnulty - Undergraduate

Exhibits

Cyberflora was debuted in April 2003 at the National Design Triennial which was hosted by the

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile (New York City), Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the ...

in New York City, New York. The exhibit began on April 22, 2003, and ended on January 25, 2004.

References

National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now

External links

installation in the National Design Triennial Massachusetts Institute of Technology Robotics projects 2003 in robotics