Side Note

Very cute!

An adorable six-legged robot will save your succulents

Meet this adorable, lovely, precious, perfect robot flower pot with six spider-like legs that scurries plants into the sunlight and shade, as needed, in order to keep them alive. I love it.

Look at it crawling into the shade!

The robot was adapted from the robot HEXA, a product of Beijing-based technology company Vincross. The prototype is only designed for small succulent plants (which, yes, are incredibly low maintenance plants). But the pot can still detect when the little plant has too much sunlight, too little sunlight, or needs water. Then, it responds appropriately by scuttling in or away from the light, or doing an angry little dance to ask for some more water.

Look at it playing with a human!

It gets better: the robot playfully squats and swipes at people when they get too close. Yes, some people may find this incredibly unsettling, coming from a crawling robot with six legs. I would like to dismiss these concerns because the robot is still very cute.

Look at it dancing (because it wants water)!

According to Vincross CEO Tianqi Sun, the project was inspired by the quiet devastation of seeing a dead sunflower four years ago.

“In 2014, I went to see a sunflower exhibition, and found myself focused on a dead sunflower near a ground of blooms,” he wrote in a blog post. “I thought, if it could move a little bit, take a 30-feet walk out of the shadow to where the other sunflowers were, it would have lived healthily. But it didn’t."

It’s not obvious that this rigged HEXA is up for the task of keeping a whole sunflower alive, but the idea of giving a plant some small level of mobility and human-like autonomy is an incredibly sweet sentiment.