Overly specialized robots just don’t capture the imagination like ones suited to many tasks. It’s why C-3PO—a protocol droid who for some reason has no tact—is so much less loveable than R2D2, who can fly spaceships, deliver video voicemail, carry Death Star plans—everything the plot demands except talking, basically. If the Transformers didn’t transform, where would they be?With this (probably) in mind, MIT researchers set out to build a simple modular robot, and they came up with M-Blocks, cube-shaped robots designed to work in tandem. With no external moving parts M-Blocks can climb over each other, roll across the ground and self-assemble by snapping together into whatever somewhat blocky shape you please.The secret within each M-Block is a flywheel that spins as fast as 20,000 revolutions per minute and magnets. When the flywheel starts up and then is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other. They snap together in a really satisfying way.In 2011 when John Romanishin, then an MIT senior, first proposed what would become the M-Block to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said she was skeptical. But after he built a prototype she came around on the design, which is unique in modular robotics.Watching the cubes, they almost seem to move haphazardly as they knock themselves over. Most robotics systems aspire to static stability, which Kyle Gilpin, an MIT post-doc who works with Rus and Romanishinm, described as “you can pause the motion at any point, and they’ll stay where they are.”One of M-Blocks’ innovations is tossing static stability aside. “There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” Gilpin said. “You are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”The magnets inside the M-Blocks align turning the edges of the blocks into hinges, allowing them to climb each other, move over top of each other, and snap neatly into formation.Swarming, modular robotics has become an increasingly verdent area of research, with swarm drones functioning as a visible and terrifying torchbearer. Researchers have gotten the controlling software and hardware together well enough to use a pack of robots to round up and dispose of smacks of jellyfish. The M-Block team hopes that that the simple shape and new locamotive principles will be scalable—both down to the tiny level and up to using specialized M-Blocks to temporary fix bridges or maybe even work as modular furniture.The plan is to present their paper on the cubes at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Until then they will be building “an army” of cubes.“We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand,” Romanishin said, perhaps unwittingly making the case for building absolutely everything out of modular robots.And what could possibly go wrong with an army of coalescing, shapeshifting robots that can self-identify?
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