As reported by Alexis Gajewski, senior editor at Plant Services, Apple is developing what it calls ELEGNT, a "prototyping of a lamp-like robot that explores the interplay between functional and expressive objectives in movement design". That quote comes from Apple's newly released paper, titled "ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot," written by Yuhan Hu, Peide Huang, Mouli Sivapurapu, and Jian Zhang.
In addition to the paper, the research team also released a video to show its vision for the robot and how it interacts with humans. It's shown reacting to simple hand waves and gestures, moving its light in different directions including up, down, forward, and back, and extending its arm to do so. It also appears to shake its head or "tail".
Apple's idea, or goal, is to take robotics to a new level by trying to do something that a lot of other robotics engineers have failed to do. Make the robot move smoothly, "elegantly" as the company stated, and be able to be expressive in its movements.
This project is still in the development and research stage and might not go anywhere. But if it does take off and actually makes it to mass development, a whole generation of people will never know the joy of holding a flashlight for your dad.
