Servo - November 2015

Stay at the Weird

If you’re planning a trip to the southern Nagasaki Prefecture (Japan) and are up for a weird experience, check out the Henn-na Hotel ( www.h-n-h.jp). And we don’t use the term “weird” disparagingly; “henn-na” actually means “weird.” For one thing, the Henn-na is the world’s first hotel attempting to cut costs by using a staff made up almost entirely of robots (they still haven’t found one that can make beds), so there are no more than 10 live bodies working there at any given time. For some unexplained reason, the English-speaking receptionist is a ferocious-looking dinosaur, whereas the Japanese version is a female humanoid that blinks her lashes at you.

The concept becomes even murkier when you discover that the hotel is part of the Huis Ten Bosch — a 380 acre waterfront theme park celebrating Dutch culture (huh?). In any event, standard guest rooms offer 226 ft2 of floor space, which is quite a bit smaller than the US average of 325 ft2. However, “superior” (306 ft2) and “deluxe” (355 ft2) rooms are also available.

Each room has a hair dryer, electric kettle, and cups and mugs, and Wi-Fi is offered throughout. However, there are no refrigerators or TVs (you can watch on a tablet), and rooms use a “radiant panel” air conditioning system to save money. Yeah, it’s different. We might recall the Hunter S. Thompson line, “It never got weird enough for me.” Various travel sites have reported the cost of one night’s stay at an unusually cheap 9,000 yen (about $80), but the hotel website specifies 44,280 yen (about $320) for two guests. So, it would be wise to check before making reservations.

The Henn-na Hotel features robotic receptionists, porters, room service, and others.

Origami Bot Folds Itself

Even if your childhood interest in origami never progressed much beyond paper airplanes and flappy birds, you may be impressed by an origami robot developed at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ( www.eecs.mit.edu). The contraption — demonstrated at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation — starts out as a printable, flat sheet of plastic that folds itself up when exposed to heat. Powered via a permanent magnet attached to its back, the assembled robot (weighing only 1/3 of a gram and measuring about a centimeter in length) can swim, climb inclines, navigate through rough terrain, and carry twice its weight.

Unlike other origami robots that require electronics and motors for actuation, this one is controlled entirely by external magnetic fields which cause the body to flex and twist so as to move it forward at nearly four body lengths per second.

According to MIT, the robot’s design was motivated by a hypothetical application in which “tiny sheets of material would be injected into the human body, navigate to an intervention site, fold themselves up, and, when they had finished their assigned tasks, dissolve.” The researchers therefore built prototypes from liquid-soluble materials.

One prototype dissolved almost entirely in acetone (everything but the magnet), whereas another had water-soluble components. “We complete the cycle from birth through life, activity, and the end of life,” noted researcher Shuhei Miyashita. “The circle is closed.”