ROHINI: A robotic flower system for intuitive smart home interface

Abstract

ROHINI is a humanoid type flower robot that mediates interactions between occupants and various devices and equipments embedded in a smart home environment. Traditional interfaces such as remote controllers, switches or buttons at home lack of intuitive and natural interactions needed to provide a highly sophisticated monitoring and control of various smart home operations. ROHINI, a rose-like anthropomorphic robot is equipped with biometric sensing system(voice recognition), flower bud and stem motion control systems as well as voice synthesis and color change actuation mechanism to respond to both occupants' and environmental demands. ROHINI can listen to the user's voice to recognize verbal command or question and then respond to it based on simple embedded conversational rules. ROHINI also could open or close its rose petals, change its flower bud color through embedded LED, bends its stem at each joint that has step motors and rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise through its rotating base panel. ROHINI has high potential to be a one of the unique robotic home service interface through which a user or group of users could monitor real time context of a smart home and control various indoor devices which constitute smart home environment.