Houseplants: We love 'em, we collect 'em...and yet we manage to kill 'em every single time.
The Vincross Hexa robot wants to change that.
As we recently discovered on The Verge, a Chinese roboticist and entrepreneur named Sun Tianqi has created a succulent-meets-robot hybrid that intuits when it needs sun (it walks itself into the light), when it needs shade (it literally hides from rays) and even when it needs water (it does a petulant little robot dance to inform its plant mom).
Apparently, the sight of a dead sunflower in a shady spot was the inspiration for the project, as Tianqi revealed in a company blog post. Plants, he wrote, are "eternally, inexplicably passive. You can cut them, burn them, and pull them out of the earth, and they do nothing. They have the fewest degrees of freedom among all the creatures in nature.” His solution? Give them legs—literally.
