Employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have made the design and manufacture of robots significantly easier and more accessible. They want to end their own robots print.
The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, part of MIT, the project must implement. The team of professor Daniele Rus has $ 10 million research money from the Us National Science Foundation received for the ‘democratisation’ of robots. The project, ‘An Expedition in Computing for Compiling Printable Programmable Machines’, a term of five years and in addition to the MIT work also the universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard.
A user must eventually own a robot can design and produce. Software must provide for the translation of feature requirements into a design on the basis of standard models; and that design would go to a print service provider, where the custom design within 24 hours, printed and assembled. The first step in the project is the development of an application which helps you to customize the standard designs.
So far, the team has two standard designs are created that, over time, can serve as a basis for specialized robots. One of the designs is an insect-like robot, which for verkennining of impassable areas can be used. The second is equipped with a gripper arm, which elderly or disabled people would be able to support.
MIT showed this week in the run-up to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation is also a kind of intelligent sand. This ‘smart sand’, such as the employees of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory of MIT, the cooperating robots to call it, could be used for creating prototypes. The cubes by the team be used, have ribs of 10 millimeters, but should eventually become much smaller. The cubes work together and communicate to form three-dimensional objects.
Built-in electromagnets can be controlled by simple cpu with 2KB of ram and 32KB of code on board to establish a connection with the adjacent cubes. In the long term to the two-dimensional structures in which the prototypes can now be redeemed for three-dimensional structures and to the individual building blocks is a lot smaller.
