Samsung Patents a Projector Robot You Control by Moving Your Foot

By Patentlyze Team · Updated Jul 10, 2026

Samsung is working on a device that projects a menu onto your floor and watches your feet to figure out what you want to pick. No touchscreen, no voice command, just a nudge of your foot.

How Samsung's floor-projected menu actually works

Imagine a small robot rolls into your living room, throws a menu onto the floor like a tiny projector, and waits for you to tap your foot toward whichever option you want. That's the core idea in this Samsung patent.

The device uses a camera to watch your feet and measures how close your foot gets to the projected buttons on the floor. When you step or scoot toward one, it registers that as your selection. The robot can also move around on its own, so the projected menu can follow you or reposition itself.

This kind of interaction is designed for situations where your hands are full, you're across the room, or touching a screen just isn't practical. Think of it as a floor-based remote control that you operate without picking anything up.

How the camera measures foot distance to register a selection

The patent describes a self-moving electronic device with three key components working together: a projection unit that casts a user interface onto any flat surface (your floor, a wall, a table), a camera that watches the scene for user movement, and a driving unit that lets the device reposition itself.

The camera captures images of the user's foot or feet and measures the distance between a tracked feature region (a specific point on the foot the system locks onto) and the device itself. As you move your foot closer to a projected button, the system uses that closing distance as an input signal. When the distance crosses a threshold, it counts as a selection.

Key elements from the claim:

• The UI is made up of multiple projected elements, like a menu with several options
• The camera reads foot movement, not just position, as the selection cue
• The system extracts distance data from the image rather than relying on a separate sensor like infrared or lidar
• The device can move under its own power, meaning it can reorient the projection or follow the user

The approach is vision-based (camera-only) rather than pressure-based, so the floor surface itself doesn't need any special hardware.

What this hints at for Samsung's rolling home robot lineup

Samsung has already shipped the Ballie, a rolling home robot with a built-in projector, and this patent fits squarely into that product line. If you own a device like that, foot-based control would let you interact with it when your hands are occupied, cooking, carrying groceries, holding a baby. It's a genuinely practical input method for a robot that's meant to float around your home.

More broadly, this reflects a real design problem: projector-based interfaces are useless if you can't interact with them without bending down or finding a remote. Solving the input problem is what makes projected UIs actually livable. Whether foot tracking is precise enough in a real home environment, with pets, kids, and dim lighting, is the open question.

Editorial commentary on a publicly published patent application. Not legal advice.