Shots of the Origami bot in action folding from flat, to a walking stance. (via Wyss Institute/Harvard)
The same team of MIT and Wyss Institute Harvard students that demo’ed a self folding inch worm at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) are taking their designs to the next level with an Origami robot. S. Felton, M. Tolley, E. Demaine, D. Rus, and R. Wood have recently published a paper in Science that outlines this interesting progress in low-cost, high-functionality robots.
Creating robots which can alter their phase states is a hot topic at the moment, as MIT researchers recently created a squishy bot that can turn from hard to soft. This Origami robot can also phase change, which allows it to fold itself. However, this robot goes a step further by being simple to create and fully autonomous. While this technology has a long way to go before it can be applied, these researchers think their Origami robots can have tons of practical applications in harsh terrains like space, extraterrestrial planet exploration, and search and rescue. It's ability to shape shift and change autonomously gives it the advantage of being able to get into hard to reach places without needing trained engineers or rocket scientists around.
The design of this robot is amazingly simple and cheap to produce. The team basically printed copper circuits onto a layer of PCB in the middle of the self-folding robot 'paper.' Two layers of paper then sandwich the layer of PCB, and a layer of Polystyrene (Shrink dinks) is placed on either side of the paper layers; thus creating a 5 layer 'shape-memory composite' that utilizes copper circuitry and polymers to allow it to fold. This is then laser cut into an Origami bot shape with dynamic and self-folding hinges and is ready for the final assembly. A microcontroller with batteries attached is then added to control the circuitry. The micro controller is pre-conditioned to know how to apply heat throughout the circuits to fold itself and walk away. This process is currently very power-hungry: depleting a whole AA battery in one go. However, the team is confident that they could utilize different materials to make the process easier and less energy intensive.
Perhaps they should team up with the squishy bot team to create something truly magical. For now, this prototype is promising as it marks one of the first phase-changing robots that can be mass-produced and deployed with little to no robotics experience.
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