It has electromagnets lined at the edges of each cube that attract or repel each other to reconfigure into different shapes and sizes.

Robots have been a key part of popular sci-fi movies, offering a glimpse into the future as to what our life with these walking machines will be like.

At present, several fixed robots can perform a myriad of dedicated functions. Work has also been going on to develop self-reconfigurable robots; machines that can change and adapt themselves to their surrounding terrain – just like an athlete. Although their application is quite promising, their size, assembling complexity and cost prevent large scale production. On top of that, separate actuation mechanisms that are bulky and complex such as motors, gears and transmissions inhibit the robot’s flexibility. [1]

Figure 1. The Scalable and Reconfigurable Robot Structure with Electromagnets

Figure 1 shows Scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) called on electromagnetism—electromagnetic fields generated by the movement of electric current—to avoid the usual stuffing of bulky and expensive actuators into individual blocks. Instead, they embedded small, easily manufactured, inexpensive electromagnets into the edges of the cubes that repel and attract, allowing the robots to spin and move around each other and rapidly change shape. [2]

To make the blocks move, they have to follow a sequence, like little homogeneous Tetris pieces. In this case, there are three steps to the polarization sequence: launch, travel, and catch, with each phase having a traveling cube (for moving), an origin one (where the traveling cube launches), and destination (which catches the traveling cube). Users of the software can specify which cube to pivot in what direction, and the algorithm will automatically compute the sequence and address of electromagnetic assignments required to make that happen (repel, attract, or turn off). [2]

For future work, moving from space to Earth is the natural next step for Electro Voxels, which would require doing more detailed modeling and optimization of these electromagnets to do reconfiguration against gravity here. [3]

When building a large, complex structure, you don’t want to be constrained by the availability and expertise of people assembling it, the size of your transportation vehicle, or the adverse environmental conditions of the assembly site. While these axioms hold true on Earth, they compound severely for building things in space,” says MIT CSAIL Ph.D. student Martin Nisser, the lead author on a paper about Electro Voxels. [3]

References:

1. https://www.electronicsforu.com/news/whats-new/scalable-reconfigurable-robot-structure-electromagnets
2. https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-robotic-cubes-self-reconfiguring-electrovoxels-embedded.html
3. https://techilive.in/robotic-cubes-self-reconfiguring-electrovoxels-use-embedded-electromagnets-to-test-applications-for-space-exploration/

Cite this article:

Thanusri swetha J (2022), Scalable and Reconfigurable Robot Structure with Electromagnets, Anatechmaz, pp. 194