This week the former MIT student known as John Romanishin revealed a plan – and working demo units – of a modular self-assembling robot pods. These little beasts may seem the thing of nightmares when they move independently, attach to one another and stand up on their own – but they’re not currently in a […]
Looking at these reconfiguring robo-cubes, created by research scientists at MIT in the face of ongoing naysaying, it strikes me that the human race can’t be far off a huge achievement: building a physical version of Tetris that self assembles. From angular chaos, to robot-enabled order. That and giving future Dalek armies the ability to bound up stairs.
The M-Blocks, shown off in the above video, are reconfigurable, modular robots with no external moving parts. The cubes’ ability to move results from harnessing the momentum of an internal flywheel (which can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions p/m) — allowing them to climb over one another, make jumps, spin and roll around. And do all that without the need for wheels or legs.
Magnets on the corners of the blocks are used for course correction and stability, so that one small leap results in an M-Block snapping tidily into place atop its fellow, rather than going rogue and skittering uselessly off the table — although they can apparently do that, too. Chamfered edges on the cubes enhance the strength of the magnetism as the cubes rotate over each other to take up their new positions.
Reconfigurable modular robots with no external moving parts have evidently been something of a Holy Grail in the modular-robotics community. “It’s one of these things that the community has been trying to do for a long time,” says Daniela Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL, speaking to MIT news. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.
“Our objective is to design self-assembling and self-reconfiguring robot systems. These are modular robots with the ability of changing their geometry according to task and this is exciting because a robot designed for a single task has a fixed architecture. And that robot will perform a single task well but it will perform poorly on a different task in a different environment,” she adds in the video.
Very long term, the goal of much modular robotics research is to be able to miniaturise modules to such an extent that swarms of self-assembling microbots (or even nanobots) can be created — capable of reconfiguring themselves into different forms, shapes and sizes, and changing their function accordingly. Albeit, that’s far-off sci-fi stuff.
In the shorter term, the researchers behind M-Blocks reckon there are still potential use-cases for their more substantially sized, reconfiguring robo-cubes. They note that large numbers of the blocks could be used to temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, for instance, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding, or assemble different types of furniture or heavy equipment. Different cubes could also carry different functions — such as a camera, lights or a battery pack — to augment overall function.
The researchers are currently building an army of 100 cubes, each with the ability to move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them — with the aim of having the cubes transform their state from being randomly scattered across the floor, to identifying each other, coming together and then autonomously transforming into various forms (chair, ladder, etc.) on demand.
There’s no shortage of proposed ideas for self-assembling robots, but they’re usually either incredibly complex
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“My name is Edward Thorp.”
“My name is Edward Thorp.”
“My name is Edward Thorp.”
It’s 1964 and Edward Thorp is on the television game show To Tell The Truth, sitting alongside two other well-dressed men also claiming to be Edward Thorp, a man so adept at card counting that he’d been barred from Las Vegas casinos. Thorp, the quiet man on the right, every bit the mathematics professor with black-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, is the real deal.
Two years earlier, Thorp’s book, Beat the Dealer, was published, explaining the system for winning at blackjack he developed based on the mathematical theory of probability. The system worked so well that Las Vegas casinos actually changed the rules of blackjack to give the dealer an added advantage. Those changes would prove to be short-lived, but Thorp’s book would go on to become a massive bestseller, and remains a key guide to the game of blackjack to this day.
That all this happened as the computer age was flourishing in the 1960s isn’t coincidental. While working to beat the house, Thorp was also working at one of the hotbeds of that revolution: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he had access to two things that would prove invaluable to his research. One was the room-filling IBM 704 computer, without which, he writes in Beat the Dealer, “the analysis on which this book is based would have been impossible.”
Nowadays, we often hear about unmanned aerial vehicles aka UAVs or drones in the news as next generation weapons of war. The researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab want to dispel that notion and show people that this new technology can be used in more positive ways. For example, as tour guides.
The SkyCall project uses a Wi-Fi network, a mobile app and quadcopters equipped with GPS, a camera and other onboard sensors to create smart tour guides. A prototype of SkyCall is already being tested at the labyrinthine grounds of MIT. To summon a drone, the user uses the call feature on the SkyCall app. When your friendly guide arrives, the user enters the alphanumeric code for his destination (I don’t know how he gets the code in the first place though). The guide will then start moving at a leisurely pace.
The drone will even talk about landmarks along the way and can be stopped by the user through the app. The drone also uses GPS to detect if the user has fallen behind a certain distance and will wait and then alert him through the app.
The SkyCall: why ask people for directions when you can build a sophisticated network of satellites and robots to guide you through life? As someone who is socially inept, I’m only being half sarcastic. I’d love to have a drone buddy to guide me around and perhaps even protect me.
[MIT SENSEable City Lab via Dezeen]
Well, well, well. They were more than happy to take all of our best assembly line and theme park greeter jobs, but now—thanks to researchers at MIT—the robots of the world have learned how to ask humans for help. Soon they’ll be pleading with the creators they’ve vowed to replace, in plain English, for assistance with tasks they just can’t seem to master on their own.
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Navigating a new campus is all part of the nostalgic movie montage that is freshman year of college. The changing leaves! The quaint Gothic architecture! The… drone tour guide? That’s the concept behind Skycall, a playful prototype that’s designed to help visiting Harvard students find their way around MIT’s notoriously confusing campus—which has been called "one of mankind’s most difficult and disorienting labyrinths."
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There’s a small army of adorable
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Fog harvesting systems—giant nets that collect and funnel billions of tiny drops of water into a reservoir—are already in use in parts of the world where rainfall is rare. But researchers at MIT, working with experts from the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, have found a way to vastly improve those nets, increasing the amount of water they collect by as much as five fold.
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Farecards are annoying. They’re usually flimsy and easy-to-lose, and depending on what city you live in, they can be impossible to swipe. Why not integrate a more high-tech solution into the system? And hey, why not make it a little bit fashionable too? Well, that’s exactly what these MIT students did.
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