While the world of robotics hasn’t exactly caught up to where entertainment media thought it could be by now, it’s still rolling along at an impressive pace. However, rather than creating autonomous Terminators and C-3PO, the industry tends to move in a more specialized direction. Case in point, this new palm-sized robotic inchworm created by a team at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. It can’t reassemble itself if you blow it up or melt it, but this printed little guy can fold itself together.
Since the robot is printed, it begins life as something of a flat sheet. Anyone that has attended elementary school and made one of those paper balloons or baskets knows what comes next. Thanks to acombination of hinges and shape memory polymers, the robot is able to fold itself together, and survive the process.
Unfortunately, the robot can’t assemble whenever it wants, and requires the hinges to be heated in order to fold itself. From there, the robot is still just a casing, but the team can easily add a battery and motor. A pick-and-place robot is meant to position the heaters, battery, and motor into the bare body, but at the moment, the team does it manually.
Perhaps the best nugget to take away from the Harvard team’s design is that the material that causes the robots to contract when heated is the magical Shrinky Dink. Instead of a colored-pencil figurine of Mickey Mouse, though, the Shrinky sheet creates the body of a crawling robotic inchworm.
Officially, the team’s next goal is to build a more complicated robot that can assemble itself without any outside help, then can walk away when built.
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