[Nfb-krafters-korner] origami robots

[Becky Frankeberger]

                WASHINGTON - In what may be the birth of cheap, easy-to-make
robots, researchers have created complex machines that transformed
themselves from little more than a sheet of paper and plastic into walking
automatons.

Borrowing from the ancient Japanese art of origami, children's toys and a
touch of the "Transformers" movies, scientists and engineers at Harvard
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created
self-assembling, paper robots. 

They are made out of hobby-shop materials that cost about $100. After the
installation of tiny batteries and motors, a paper robot rises on four
stumpy legs and starts scooting in a herky-jerky manner. It transforms from
flat paper to jitterbugging robot in just four minutes.

To illustrate, Samuel Felton, a graduate student at Harvard University,
connected the batteries on an intricately cut sheet on a table, sending
electricity coursing through, heating it. The sheet lurched to life, the
pieces bending and folding into place. The transformation complete, the
sheet, now a four-limbed robot, scurried away at more than 2 inches a
second.

The creation, reported Thursday in the journal Science, is the first robot
that can fold itself and start working without any intervention from the
operator.

"We're trying to make robots as quickly and cheaply as possible," said
Felton, lead author of the study.

Inspired by origami, the Japanese paper-folding art, such robots could be
deployed, for example, on future space missions, Felton said. Or perhaps the
technology could one day be applied to Ikea-like furniture, folding from a
flat-packed board to, say, a table without anyone fumbling with Allen
wrenches or deciphering instructions seemingly rendered in hieroglyphics.

Felton's sheet is not simple paper, but a composite made of layers of paper,
a flexible circuit board and Shrinky Dinks - plastic sheets, sold as a toy,
that shrink when heated above 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers attached
to the sheet two motors, two batteries and a microcontroller that served as
the brain for the robot. Those components accounted for $80 of the $100 of
materials needed for the robot.

The sheet took a couple of hours for Felton to construct. Still, it was
simpler and cheaper than the manufacturing process for most machines today -
robots, iPhones, cars - that are made of many separate pieces that are then
glued, bolted and snapped together.

Felton and a study co-author, Daniela Rus of MIT, say creating such small,
lightweight robots could be the start of a long-envisioned robotic
revolution.

Felton and Rus say they see a time when someone who wants a dog-walking
robot would go to a store that has specialized equipment to make the device
- "some sort of robo-Kinkos," Felton said.

Eventually, the technology could produce more complex machines.

"In principle it will be possible to say, 'I want a robot to play chess with
me,' and generate a machine that has the computational abilities to play
chess with you," Rus said.

"This is a simple, flexible and rapid design process and a step toward the
dream of realizing the vision of 24-hour robot manufacturing."

The robots aren't quite Transformers of movie and cartoon fame. Once they
assemble themselves automatically with heat-activated hinges that allow the
folding, there are no more changes, Rus and Felton said.

The creation starts out a bit smaller than a normal 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of
paper. 

The robots, which the researchers did not name, are about 6 inches long, 6
inches wide, and 2 inches tall. They weigh less than 3 ounces. They move
about 2 inches per second. But they can be made bigger or smaller, with some
limitations, Felton said.

"It's just an amazing feat of engineering," said Michael Dickey, a professor
of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University
who was not involved in the project but provided the inspiration for using
Shrinky Dinks in self-folding structures. "It's all programmed in, and you
hit go."

Although Felton meticulously designed the walking robot, the hope is that
the mathematics of origami folding will allow computer software to figure
out the cuts and folds needed to create complex robots capable of doing
almost any task.

A second paper in Science this week described how origami folding can alter
the properties of a material. "That isn't something that is really done in
the material-science community," said Itai Cohen, a professor of physics at
Cornell University and the senior author of the paper.

Cohen and colleagues examined sheets with a particular pattern of repeating
folds known as Miura-Ori tessellation. By popping out some of the folds, the
properties of the sheets changed, becoming stiffer or curved or able to
swing like a hinge.

"It becomes this kind of material you can transform on the fly, and that's
what's really interesting," Cohen said.

For example, a folded-up sheet could be unfurled on top of a building and
then made rigid, forming a roof. Or the technique could be incorporated into
the surface of robotic limbs, floppy and flexible when reaching for an
object and then stiffening to pick it up.

"This is still all science fiction," he acknowledged.

 

 

Becky Frankeberger

Butterfly Knitting

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