While Intel is working on robots you can print and assemble on your own, a group of researchers is working out how to create 3D printed robot parts that could fold themselves into a full robot figure when heated, sort of like high-tech origami.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be presenting two new papers at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering International Conference on Robotics currently in progress in Hong Kong until June 5 to demonstrate how printable robot parts can also be bakeable, but not with batter. No, baked-batter robots sound mouth-watering, but these robots aren't made from batter. They are made from a special polymer called polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the same material used in that favorite childhood toy, the Shrinky Dink.
"If you have a printer at home and some scissors, you could in principle take the design files from our software and cut out your own robot," says Daniela Rus, an electrical engineering professor at MIT and co-author of the two papers.
Researchers took the Shrinky Dink material and sandwiched it between two layers of rigid polyester full of slits of different sizes. When exposed to heat, the PVC contracts and the slits close and push up against each other to bend the PVC and change its shape. The researchers said the trick is in cutting the slits with the right widths and at the right places so that the PVC folds into the desired 3D structure. However, creating a pattern of slits is not as easy as it sounds.
"You're doing this really complicated global control that moves every edge in the system at the same time," explains Rus in a news release. "You want to design those edges in such a way that the result of composing all these motions, which actually interfere with each other, leads to the correct geometric structure."
The researchers are also working out how to build the electrical components, such as resistors and capacitors, that go inside the self-folding robots. The motor that powers the foldable robot could be made from a copper-coated polyester coil that can also fold itself into shape.
The bakeable origami robots are only as big as a conventional toaster oven can contain, which is what the researchers are currently using to bake their robots, but Rus says they could be "as big as your own oven can sustain."
We can only imagine what kinds of foldable robots can be baked from out of those giant commercial ovens. Let's not hope to end up eaten by our own baked creations!
