Coverage by our in-house scientist – Aditya Sengupta. You can must follow him on twitter: @sengupta!
One of the tough things about sophisticated robots these days is they are considerably difficult to modify and adapt. At this point, it takes considerable time and effort to get a robot to perform one task satisfactorily- having it perform other tasks often requires one to go right back to the drawing board. And even then significant modifications are often required.
Also, repairing a robot when a component fails or gets damaged can be challenging, since most are custom built for a specific task. Downtime is, therefore, an important consideration in the application of robots. The Modular Robotics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania aims at solving these challenges with complex robots built with absolute modular components.
These Connector Kinetic Robots are designed to be small and inexpensive- and built with only two kinds of modules, each with a single degree of rotational freedom. These can be easily joined together in various configurations along different rotational axes. Add-ons such as cameras, proximity sensors and grippers can also be attached to these modules. The system is so smart; it can reassemble itself after it’s been kicked apart:
The modules are designed to be small enough to fit through a 3 inch pipe – so that it can crawl through one in prospective search and rescue operations.
Another fascinating configuration is the dynamic running mode- which uses legs (purely passive- no actuators in the legs) to hop around from place to place (locomotion is achieved by moving the bodyaround, not the legs). The nice folks from the Modlab gave us this live demonstration:
Right out of a sci-fi movie? You bet!
More information here: http://modlabupenn.org/ckbot/
