Expandable furniture helps micro-apartment inhabitants make the most out of limited square footage with the push of a button. Trundle beds and convertible couches may define making the most of a small living space, but what’s been lacking is automation and modernization. Enter Ori, robotic furniture that appears, and disappears, with the push of a button. Modular Momentum The brainchild of Hasier Larrea, Ori furniture takes the guesswork out of transformation, seamlessly morphing floor units and wall installations into beds and pop-out closets. Ori offers a full-scale bedroom with a retractable bed that can be changed into an office or a closet, along with a full media console/credenza. Other versions include a walk-in closet, couch and various flavors of storage space. All the systems can be integrated into new and existing floorplans, which allows the Ori system to fit comfortably into any new building development or retrofit. During her tenure as the leader of the Architectural Robotics research area at the MIT Media Lab, Larrea married her robotics tech with Yves Behar design. The final product involves modular, transformable furniture Larrea and her team hope will debut early next year. “Larson’s team at the Media Lab developed the technologies behind Ori as part of the CityHome research,” Larrea told Mashable in a recent interview. “Then we created some initial functional prototypes … and went to [designer] Yves Béhar to help us ‘transform’ this initial concept from a robot/machine to a customizable system that people would love to have in their homes.” Space on Demand Ori’s first piece available for purchase includes a trundle style bed that rolls out from the bottom of a large wall of shelves. Specially designed actuators, electronics and software created by researchers at MITs CityHome project allows Ori’s furniture  to almost...