Telegarden

A white robotic arm with a vertical appendage sticks out from a flower filled circular garden in a platform like a silver coffee table.
A robot gardener controlled by Web users. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

The Telegarden was a robotic art installation that allowed anyone on the Internet to interact with a remote garden. Users teleoperated a robot arm to plant, water, and monitor the progress of living plants.

Creator

The Telegarden Project

Year
1995
Country
United States 🇺🇸
Categories
Features
What is the Telegarden? Video: Ken Goldberg

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Did you know?

More than 100,000 people visited the Telegarden website and operated the robot during its nine years of operation.

Screenshots show the display a user would see including the arm and close-ups of flowers.
The Telegarden user interface. Photo: Ken Goldberg

Audio

Ken Goldberg, one of the creators of the Telegarden, describes the goals of the project and his surprise with people's reaction to it.

Ken Goldberg, one of the creators of the Telegarden, describes the goals of the project and his surprise with people's reaction to it.

Photo: Robert Vente
Is the Telegarden real? Ken Goldberg explains how a student's question got him thinking about the implications of knowledge acquired at a distance.

Is the Telegarden real? Ken Goldberg explains how a student's question got him thinking about the implications of knowledge acquired at a distance.

Photo: Ira Serkes

History

The Telegarden, created at the University of Southern California, was first exhibited at the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles in 1995. The next year it moved to the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, where it was on exhibit and available 24 hours a day for eight years. It was finally disabled in August 2004. The project leads were Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, and the project team included George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley, and Erich Berger.

Specs

Overview

Equipped with a SCARA industrial robot. End-effector fitted with a camera, a watering line, and a seed dibble.

Status

Inactive

Year

1995

Website
Width
182 cm
Height
152 cm
Length
182 cm
Weight
1000 kg
Sensors

Color CCD camera (on the robot arm) and external cameras.

Actuators

Adept four-axis industrial robot arm.

Degrees of Freedom (DoF)
5 (Robot: 4 DoF; Seed planting system: 1 DoF)
Materials

Aluminum frame, plastic plumbing.

Compute

Three PCs

Software

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) code written in C.

Power

Power supply for robot and an air compressor for the seed pickup system.

Cost
$100,000 (approximate)