Robots have grown up in a few decades from the stuff of science fiction to a nearly ubiquitous element of modern life, though to date, they are mostly hidden behind an industrial curtain. Robots have become integral to building everything from cars to custom clothes and to exploring the planets nearest our own.
Now a group at Harvard has taken things a literal step further, making a robot out of children’s toys that can assemble itself from a flat sheet, get up, turn around and walk away. (Actually, the walking resembles a crabwise crawl, just not sideways.)
"Imagine a ream [500 sheets] 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,” said Sam Felton, a Ph.D. student at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the lead author on the scientific paper announcing the achievement. “They could take images, collect data, and more.”
Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and at SEAS, working with their cross-town colleagues at MIT, made the table-top robotic crawlers from paper and the kind of heat-shrink plastic some of us can still remember as “Shrinky Dinks,” attached to a pair of the sort of electric motors that power a toy fan.
For the design, they recognized that the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding provided a template for turning the two-dimensional into three. Approaching it like an origami project allowed them to circumvent the traditional approach to building complex machines. The result is an autonomous robot that can be shipped flat and, on command, put itself together and begin wandering around its environment with no more direction from a central controller.
Origami Robots