These printable robots self-assemble when heated #robotics
MIT news has the story on the super cool printable robots that will self-assemble once they are heated.
Printable robots — those that can be assembled from parts produced by 3-D printers — have long been a topic of research in the lab of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rus’ group and its collaborators introduce a new wrinkle on the idea: bakable robots.
In two new papers, the researchers demonstrate the promise of printable robotic components that, when heated, automatically fold into prescribed three-dimensional configurations.
One paper describes a system that takes a digital specification of a 3-D shape — such as a computer-aided design, or CAD, file — and generates the 2-D patterns that would enable a piece of plastic to reproduce it through self-folding.
The other paper explains how to build electrical components from self-folding laser-cut materials. The researchers present designs for resistors, inductors, and capacitors, as well as sensors and actuators — the electromechanical “muscles” that enable robots’ movements.
“We have this big dream of the hardware compiler, where you can specify, ‘I want a robot that will play with my cat,’ or ‘I want a robot that will clean the floor,’ and from this high-level specification, you actually generate a working device,” Rus says. “So far, we have tackled some subproblems in the space, and one of the subproblems is this end-to-end system where you have a picture, and at the other end, you have an object that realizes that picture. And the same mathematical models and principles that we use in this pipeline we also use to create these folded electronics.”
Both papers build on previous research that Rus did in collaboration with Erik Demaine, another professor of computer science and engineering at MIT. This work explored how origami could be adapted to create reconfigurable robots.
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