Rosie, the Room­ba Remix

The Strand­beest

You've prob­ably seen the in­cred­ible ki­netic art­work of Theo Jansen. In 2007, a TED video was re­leased fea­turing the Dutch artist's Strand­beest — a skeletal-looking, beach crawler. Jansen's unique me­chan­ical de­sign al­lows the "beest" to walk across the sand, pro­pelled by the wind.

The Legsystem

Jansen is a bril­liant mind in the sci­ence and art of ap­plied physics. He in­vented the me­chan­ical mo­tion for what he calls the Legsystem in 1991. Since then, his cu­riosity for ki­netic art has com­pelled him to breathe life into a long lin­eage of fan­tas­tical "beests".

His viral en­thu­siasm has spawned sim­i­larly in­clined artists, makers and en­gi­neers to apply the Legsystem mech­a­nism in their own pro­jects and cre­ations. Check out Blaine El­liot's Strand­beest bi­cycle :

The mech­a­nism it­self is fairly straight­for­ward, yet el­e­gant. It con­sists of two rigid tri­an­gles held to­gether at four hinging points. A single axis tips the top tri­angle back and forth, while the rigid mem­bers force the bottom tri­angle to move with a life-like gait.

In­spi­ra­tion in 60s Ads

While taking Sense and Re­spond, a class taught by Martin Miller , I was in­ter­ested in ap­plying Jansen's legsystem within a do­mestic cleaning ap­pli­ance.

My col­lab­o­rator, Brad Nathanson , and I sought to sat­i­rize the ad­ver­tise­ments of mid-twen­tieth cen­tury con­sumer prod­ucts.

New do­mestic tech­nolo­gies (toasters, vac­uums, food-proces­sors, etc.) were mar­keted as tools to ease the burden of the cook­iecutter house­wife. Our own tool— for dis­man­tling this stereo­type— was named Rosie, after the robot from the 1960s The Jet­sons...

Un­like the stream­lined stain­less steel and mold-in­jected plas­tics found in many of the prod­ucts of the time, Brad and I de­cided to use mostly re­cy­cled or reused ma­te­rials. Rosie's own "Legsystem" was built from sal­vaged wood trim and cab­i­netry pieces. The welded steel and ply­wood that make up the gearbox and axle were all scraps from our school's shop.

Building a New Rosie

The pins at the two major axes of the Legsystem slide into half-inch di­am­eter pipe, which was bent and welded to form an adhoc axle.

We mounted a 2.5 horse­power, cast-iron electic motor (pur­chased for $15 at a re­sale shop) on the back of a bor­rowed shop­ping cart to move the legs.

The motor spins a few bike chains through a se­ries of lam­i­nated ply­wood gears and fly­wheels. A bit of graphite al­lowed the steel rods to ro­tate rather smoothly, pro­pelling Rosie for­ward on her push-broom feet.

Rosie's Heart

Up top is Rosie's new age "heart"— an Ar­duino Mega that is wired up on a bread­board to re­ceive re­mote con­trol sig­nals. We used this helpful tu­to­rial to find the IR codes from the over­sized re­mote which switches on one of the solid-state re­lays— sending power to the ice-crusher, blender, or the motor.

In ad­di­tion to the elec­tronics and counter-top ap­pli­ances, a soft pad of red shag pro­duces a con­ve­nient and com­fort­able cradle for your baby.

Al­to­gether, you have a per­son­i­fied do­mestic cleaning robot that would kick your Room­ba's ass! Relax from the com­fort of your couch with the re­mote in hand. Let Rosie pre­pare you a chunky smoothie as she gently vi­brates your baby to sleep. Sweep away your trou­bles with this af­ford­able, amazing product!

The glasses were from Hal­loween (I dressed up as Linda from Bob's Burgers), but we added them to give Rosie a more homely look. The steel bolt "eye­balls" looked a little too sin­ister on their own. Here's the final glamour photo. 👇

Rosie In­fomer­cial

Lastly, we put to­gether an in­fomer­cial-style video to show­case Rosie and con­struct our satir­ical nar­ra­tive (à la Slap Chop / Billy Mays ).

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