Origami inspired robots fold themselves into action. via new scientist
It’s a real Transformer. A flat chunk of butterfly-shaped plastic magically folds itself into the shape of a four-legged robot – and then, astonishingly, walks off using its own power source.
Built by a team led by microrobotics engineers Sam Felton and Robert Wood at Harvard University in Massachusetts, the robot gets its basic flat-pack form from the Japanese art of paper folding – origami.
By choosing flat shapes that will unfold into forms that produce movable legs – a subset of the art called rigid origami – the team simply had to work out how to get its morphing machine to automatically unfold and crawl.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Mu 1.2.0 Released, WSL Out of Beta and so much more! #CircuitPython @micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
