Programming robots with rubber bands

From sorting objects in a warehouse to navigating furnishings whereas vacuuming, robots at present use sensors, software program management programs, and transferring elements to carry out duties. The more durable the duty or extra advanced the surroundings, the extra cumbersome and costly the digital elements.

Mechanical engineering researchers within the Harvard John A. Paulson College of Engineering and Utilized Sciences (SEAS) suppose there’s one other technique to design robots: Programming meant features immediately right into a robotic’s bodily construction, permitting the robotic to react to its environment with out the necessity for intensive on-board electronics.

A staff from the lab of Katia Bertoldi, the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Utilized Mechanics at SEAS, designed a proof-of-concept strolling robotic with simply 4 transferring elements related by rubber bands and powered by one motor. With its actions programmed through the position of the rubber bands, the robotic can discover its manner by means of mazes and keep away from obstacles; its actions change based mostly solely on how it’s touched or pressed by its surroundings, with no digital mind.

Additionally they present that the identical mechanical programming can be utilized to make a robotic able to sorting objects by mass. The demonstration may spark new inquiry into fundamentals of robotic design, probably resulting in smaller, less complicated robots that may carry out quite a lot of features.

Revealed in Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences, the work was led by Leon Kamp, a graduate pupil in Bertoldi’s lab whose secondary graduate research is in Vital Media Observe. Skilled in engineering and structure, Kamp turned to robotics as a sensible utility of his curiosity in kind, materials, and mechanics. He questioned if robotic intelligence could possibly be infused into construction utilizing mechanical ideas.

“That is type of an excessive model of ‘kind follows operate,’ the place functionalities like reminiscence, adaptability and intelligence will be enabled by geometry and materials parameters,” Kamp stated.

Kamp and colleagues constructed their robotic mechanism from a series of flat plastic blocks joined by levers and rubber bands. The stretching of the rubber bands assigns a sure vitality value to rotating every lever. The motion of the mechanism will be “programmed” because it follows the order of rotations that has the bottom vitality value. By attaching a leg to this mechanism, they constructed a robotic that may stroll ahead and backward utilizing one motor for various configurations of rubber bands.

This bodily programming permits the robotic to passively sense and reply to forces from its surroundings. It “feels” its environment through a pair of antennae hooked up to the entrance. When one antenna hits an impediment, the robotic responds and adapts from strolling straight to turning away. It will possibly autonomously navigate mazes or transfer away from obstacles.

In one other configuration, the mechanism can be utilized to mechanically kind objects based mostly on their mass. On this case the rubber bands are used to “program,” the place objects are picked up and dropped off at completely different places for particular focused plenty.

Whereas the mechanism can solely accomplish a small variety of easy duties, the idea could possibly be expanded to robots that transfer sooner or leap over obstacles. Sooner or later, robots like this could possibly be made from versatile supplies which might be light-weight and simple to fabricate. Such designs may result in autonomous machines which might be bodily clever and depend on fewer electronics or conventional management programs to operate.