Caltech Develops RC Car-Sized Robot ‘Morphobot’ That Can Walk, Drive, Fly

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Caltech Develops RC Car-Sized Robot 'Morphobot' That Can Walk, Drive, Fly

Caltech has developed a new versatile robot. Its new RC car-sized bot can change shapes to suit its environment best.

Meet Caltech's Morphobot

In a press release, Caltech compares M4-short for Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot, to a Transformer due to its ability to change shapes. The robot is equipped with motors, electronics, and a tiny computer, allowing it to choose how it should move around, The Verge reported.

The design team gave the M4 huge wheels that can swing up to resemble rotors on a drone and take flight in a matter of seconds. According to a report published in Nature Communications, it can also use its rotors to propel itself forward from the ground while climbing a steep hill.

As an alternative, if the robot must traverse

Alternatively, the robot can stand on two wheels and utilize them more like feet if it wants to cross a particularly uneven section of terrain or needs a better view of what's ahead.

In collaboration with Alireza Ramezani, an electrical and computer engineering assistant professor at Northeastern University, and Mory Gharib, a professor of aeronautics and bioinspired engineering at Caltech, she created the M4.

In addition to cute illustrations of the creatures that inspired the project, such as meerkats and walruses, the paper outlines M4's functionalities, including its different forms. According to the study, the robot is propelled by a Jetson Nano CPU, a reasonably priced, small computer with a robotics focus from Nvidia.

Overall, the M4 can "achieve eight distinct types of motion" and can make decisions on its own by analyzing the environment with artificial intelligence. Gharib believes its capabilities may be useful when transporting injured people to medical facilities or exploring distant worlds.

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Origami-Inspired Polygon Robot Mori3

Caltech's new robot is not the first of its kind. In a previous report from Science Times, researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland also developed a shapeshifting robot named Mori3.

The objective of Mori3, according to Jamie Paik, leader of the EPFL's Reconfigurable Robotics Lab and a co-author of the study, is to create a modular, origami-like robot that can be put together and taken apart as required depending on the environment and the task at hand. Mori3 can change its size, look, and function.

The robot itself is shaped like a triangle. When combined with other Mori3s, it may be molded in any way you need it to be. Think about the forms that are created by polygons in video game graphics. It may change into whatever form that you require. It suggests that the robot can move, interact with its environment, and control objects.

Robotics researcher at EPFL and paper co-author Christoph Belke underlined that they needed to reevaluate how we think of robots. By joining, interacting, and reconfiguring themselves, these robots may alter their shapes and produce mobile, articulated structures.