During the last two weeks, many of our team spent long hours in New York City at the Time Warner Center, operating a Hugging/Talking/Vibrating Robotic Loveseat for the Conan O’Brien show. Conan typically tapes his shows in LA, but he taped all of last week’s shows in NYC. We built the Loveseat in celebration of his return, and to show New Yorkers how much he had missed the Big Apple.
Although a Hugging Loveseat is one of the more absurd concepts we’ve dreamed up, it proved to be an enormous success for the show; more than 40% of fans who sat on the Loveseat shared their experience through social media. It’s like we always say, if you create a cool experience, people will talk about it. Over-engineering social media doesn’t work.
So what is the Conan Hugging Loveseat?
The Conan Hugging Loveseat is the first fully-robotic hugging loveseat. Visitors can relax on the Loveseat and let Conan listen to their concerns, express his love (yes, the couch actually talks), offer a relaxing back and bottom massage, and extend a warm embrace. Participants can bring a friend or come alone; we capture the moment with a souvenir photo. Lucky participants win Team Coco gear.
What is the Loveseat made of?
The Conan Hugging Loveseat is 500 pounds of pure love.
However, behind the soft embrace is a lot of heavy machinery. Inside the steel frame are two industrial motor controllers and four industrial linear actuators, creating 250 pounds of strength per joint.
Though the couch is immobile, it features many aspects of an advanced mobile robot, including steel/aluminum frame construction, linear actuators, motor controllers, microprocessors, AGM batteries, and wifi communication. Wheels were not included to prevent robotic joyriding (which as you can see from the photo below, Patrick isn’t pleased about).
Stay tuned; we’ll be releasing a Making of the Conan Hugging Loveseat video soon.
