JOGGERS who find it hard to set a steady pace could soon have a robot companion to help – a small, quad-rotor helicopter drone. The system, called Joggobot, is being developed by at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
The duo plan to allow users to enter their preferred running speed into a smartphone app that controls the drone so it flies ahead of a jogger at just the right pace. Or it could be set to maintain a distance of a few metres no matter what pace a runner is going, just for fun.
They tested their idea using the foam-fendered AR Drone made by , programming it using custom software to follow a bright blue and orange pattern painted on a runner’s T-shirt (pictured below). As soon as an on-board camera sees the shirt, the craft takes off and hovers about a metre off the ground. If it loses sight of the pattern, the drone lands automatically.
Advertisement
Mueller says he and Gräther are tinkering with settings to test what motivates runners. “Should the robot be more like a coach or more like a pet?” he asks. “One might make the exercise more effective, but the other might make it more fun. Which one is ‘better’? And is there a ‘better’?”
