Robotics · Completed V1 · September 19, 2026
A desk lamp with a little character.
PALA, the Programmable Autonomous Lamp Assistant, turns an IKEA NYMÅNE lamp into a five-axis desk companion. Custom printed mechanisms, camera perception, and expressive motion come together in a working, supervised prototype.
From a visible cue to physical expression
The finished V1 film: real hardware, the lamp's camera view, mechanism details, and motion reconstruction.
Read the interaction description
PALA makes a small noticing movement when someone sits down, greets a look toward its shade-mounted camera, and celebrates a thumbs-up with a lean, recoil, and coordinated yaw/pitch motion. Pointing left or right selects a turn in that general direction. Turning back to work lets the lamp disengage and settle into gentle breathing at rest.
The film pairs the physical lamp with camera footage, mechanism close-ups, and simulator views. Charts show commanded angles, not the actual measured position of the servos.
Observation → behavior → motion
The model interprets a scene. Local code decides how the lamp moves.
Observe a stationary snapshot
A shade-mounted Logitech camera captures the scene through GStreamer. Gemini returns structured observations of presence, apparent attention, and visible gestures.
Choose a fixed performance
Python behavior gates check freshness and interaction stage before selecting deterministic choreography. Gemini never supplies servo angles.
Execute within configured limits
Independent perception, behavior, control, and hardware loops run on Jetson. A PCA9685 drives five hobby-servo joints through calibrated mappings and joint limits.
What V1 establishes
A complete interaction loop
The final performances were tuned on the physical lamp through repeated operator ratings. Camera framing and mechanical constraints shaped both the resting posture and expressive gestures.
Software evidence
The V1 release reports 361 passing software tests and clean dummy-runtime startup and shutdown. A browser simulator and gesture workshop support iteration; they do not validate physical safety.
Deliberate boundaries
This is a supervised prototype with variable model latency and constrained seated framing. Observations pause during motion. Pointing selects left/right choreography, and the servos provide no measured joint feedback.
The fifth joint is available but largely unused in the final gestures. The deadman timeout is software-only, not an independent electrical emergency stop. Full CAD and some hardware details remain pending.