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It’s barely been a week since Intel announced their print-a-robot concept, and news has already surfaced of another similar concept for the future of robotics. Well, the future of robotics and ovens.
The concept hails from MIT, where researchers have released a couple of papers outlining how self-folding components for robots could be 3D printed, and then be baked into parts for the robotic pal.
According to Daniela Rus, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT the project is all about true customisability: “We have this big dream of the hardware compiler, where you can specify, ‘I want a robot that will play with my cat,’ or ‘I want a robot that will clean the floor, and from this high-level specification, you actually generate a working device.”
The first paper deals outlines how self-folding plastics are used in computer generated shapes to create the body of the robot, and the second paper discusses how electrical components would be used to get the whole thing to work after baking.
The MIT team will present their findings later this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
The technology is obviously in research phase, but we can’t wait to print out a robot for…anything we want it for, really.
Source: The Verge
