MIT Researchers Create Miniature Shape-Shifting Robot (Video)

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a small, caterpillar-like robot made of metal rings and strips that can fold itself into complex shapes, MIT reported on Friday.

Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, Ara Knaian, a visiting scientist, and Kenneth Cheung, a postdoctoral associate, created the miniature device, called a milli-motein. Gershenfeld explained, "It's effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes."

In creating the tiny device, the MIT researchers had to create a new motor that was both small and strong-the electropermanent motor. According to a report by MIT, the motor is similar in design to giant electromagnets used in scrapyards to lift cards using a powerful permanent magnet with a weaker magnet that can flip its magnetic field direction with an electric current in a coil.

The small device contains a series of permanent magnets are paired with electromagnets in a circle, while a steel ring is positioned around them. According to Knaian, "they do not take power in either the on or the off state, but only use power in the changing state."

The robot's design is based on a paper by Cheung, MIT professor Erik Demaine, alumnus Saul Griffith and the former Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research scientist Jonathan Bachrach, MIT reported. The paper, which was published last year, analyzed the "theoretical possibility of assembling any desired 3-D shape simply by folding a long string of identical subunits."

Demain added that the folding does not have to occur in a straight sequence. "Ideally, you'd like to do it all at once," the professor said. According to MIT, the researchers' work "could lead to robotic systems that can be dynamically reconfigured to do many different jobs rather than repeating a fixed function".

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation and Programmable Matter projects sponsored the research team. Their study was presented at the recent 2012 Intelligent Robots and Systems conference.