# Topics > Smart home > Smart lamp, smart bulb >  Toro-bots, robotic japanese garden lamps, Alvaro Cassinelli, Tokyo, Japan

## Airicist

Designer - Alvaro Cassinelli

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## Airicist

Testing the "toro-bots" (robotic japanese garden lamps) 

Published on Feb 22, 2014




> Testing a pair of robotic japanese garden lamps for a "generative garden" exhibited at the French Institute of Culture in Tokyo: Digital Shock 
> A traditional Japanese garden strives to represent a miniature natural landscape. Following clear aesthetic principles (such as miniaturisation, concealment and asymmetry), a Japanese garden is designed to recreate the eyes and foster contemplation and meditation. 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. We propose here 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.
> 
> Some technical details: the base of the lamp is a quad-pod robot from Trossen Robotics. Each lamp posses a different "personality" (hard coded into a hierarchy of probabilistic Markov chains). The lamps sense the surrounding using infrared rangefinders, and communicate with a central computer using an Xbee network; the central computer then provides this information using a wireless OSC network (demo modes can be summoned using an iPad). More interestingly, the lamps are tracked thanks to infrared blinking LEDs on the top - a 120Hz IR camera looking at the garden takes these images, which are convolved by several "reference" signals. We achieved robust tracking with negligible delay (more on this later), and a very good signal to noise ratio.

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## Airicist

Torobots take a walk (during hanami)

Published on May 12, 2014

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## Airicist

The Toro-bots fight for love (and beer) 

 Published on May 12, 2014




> This demo shows the different "personalities" of these robot lamps.
> 
> As in the other demos, the dynamics of the robots has been sped up to "human time scale".

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## Airicist

Torbobots dancing - QUANTUM (Montevideo, Uruguay) 

Published on Apr 10, 2015




> My last minute robotic contribution to Emil Montgomery show "QUANTUM" (Tangerine-chan and Sakura-chan)

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