Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces
summary
An open-source open-hardware platform named Zooids builds a tabletop swarm UI from 2.6 cm wheeled micro-robots that embed motors, touch sensors, radios and batteries (1–2 hours), move up to ~0.5 m/s, and self-localize using a DLP structured-light tracking at 3 kHz decoded to give each robot position and orientation at ~70 Hz with millimeter-level precision but ~1 cm real-world error. The software uses Hungarian assignment plus local five-step control; demos include information visualization, spline editing, sliders, and object actuation; limits are projector-constrained area, non-omnidirectional drive, and cost/scale.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to Zooids
- 1:05Swarm User Interfaces concept
- 2:33Applications and contributions
- 5:03Design principles for Swarm UIs
- 8:19Implementation and hardware
- 10:49Control system and API
- 11:33Demo applications
- 12:37Limitations and challenges
- 13:00Future research directions
- 14:52Ubiquitous robotics vision
- 15:36Q&A session
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