Scientists at Harvard and MIT have developed an origami flat-pack robot which self assembles into a complex shape in four minutes and crawls away without any human intervention.
A team of engineers used little more than paper and Shrinky Dinks, the classic children’s toy that shrinks when heated, to build the robot. The advance demonstrates the potential to quickly and cheaply build sophisticated machines that interact with the environment, and to automate much of the design and assembly process.
“Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” said senior author Rob Wood, a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The advance also harbours potential for rather exotic applications as well. “Imagine a ream of dozens of robotic satellites sandwiched together so that they could be sent up to space and then assemble themselves remotely once they get there, they could take images, collect data, and more,” said lead author Sam Felton, who is pursuing his Ph.D. at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The new robot is the first that builds itself and performs a function without human intervention. “Here we created a full electromechanical system that was embedded into one flat sheet,” Felton said.
The team used computer design tools to inform the optimal design and fold pattern, and after about 40 prototypes, Felton honed in on the one that could fold itself up and walk away. He fabricated the sheet using a solid ink printer, a laser machine, and his hands.
The refined design only took about two hours to assemble using a method that relies upon the power of origami, the ancient Japanese art whereby a single sheet of paper can be folded into complex structures. The origami-inspired approach enabled the team to avoid the traditional “nuts and bolts” approach to assembling complex machines. They started with a flat sheet, to which they added two motors, two batteries, and a micro-controller, which acts like the robot’s “brain,” Felton said.
