Miscellaneous

Autonomous Self-Reconfigurable Locomotive Robot: designed and built by Muhammad Hasan Shariq for BEng Mechanical Engineering Honours Project (2009-2010) at Heriot-Watt University, Dubai Campus.

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Today TTPM is reviewing the Imaginext DC Super Friends Transforming Batmobile R/C from Fisher-Price! Drive Batman in his Batmobile with this remote control vehicle. Press a button to transform the car from Street mode to Battle mode, complete with automatic disk launchers. Easy for preschool fans to control. See more in this video review!

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See some prototypes of robot swarms created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Uploaded on Jan 24, 2008
Read more: "Shape-shifting robot forms from magnetic swarm"

by Tom Simonite
January 29, 2008

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Researchers developed an origami-inspired active graphene-based paper with programmed gradients. The material could be used for programmable instant self-folding devices remote-controlled by gentle light or heating.
Video includes demonstration of: self-folding box, worm-like device walking and turning, and an "artificial/robotic hand" grasping.

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Major Project for my BA (Hons) Computer Visualisation and Animation undergraduate degree at Bournemouth University (NCCA). 8 months of work from concept to completion. CGI produced in Houdini 9.5, composited in Shake.

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Made by: Muhammad Hasan Shariq

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Georgia Tech researchers find ways to use Origami as the structural basis for real world applications such as deployable antennas and bridges.

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Finding a parking space may soon become much easier thanks to a car that can fold itself up and squeeze into small spaces.

Inspired by the "Transformer" toys, the electric vehicle, called Earth-1, was designed by Kunio Okawara, famous in Japan as the artist behind the long-running popular robot anime 'Gundam'.

Tokyo based next-generation car design and manufacturing company Four Link Systems say they hope Earth 1 will get approval to drive on the roads by March 2018.

And despite costing as much as a high-end Lexus at $70,000 (£52,000), the company has already accepted 30 orders from clients from Japan, China and Dubai since its launch at the Tokyo Motor Show in October.

Four Link Systems say their goal is to sell 300 cars a year for use around airports or in tourist spots.

Hiroomi Kinoshita, President & Chief Executive Officer at Four Link Systems, Inc., who's worked on the creation of next-generation smart vehicle since 2008, said he was also hoping to appeal to a younger generation of drivers who are less interested in cars than previous generations.

"We developed a vehicle which make drivers feel as if they're steering something that's not a car," Kinoshita said.

Robots were the perfect fit, he said, adding that is why they asked Okawara of Gundam fame to design the two-seater vehicle.

"So we offered a robot-inspired shape and made people feel like they are operating a robot while driving. This what makes our car unique and enhances a sense of immersion with the vehicle," Kinoshita said.

The Gundam series, which has been on Japanese TV since the 1970s, captured the imagination of a whole generation and continues to be popular to this day, with a 'real-life size' 20 meter (65 feet) high Gundam robot mechanical statue even becoming the latest tourist attraction in Tokyo.

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Here we have Bumblebee as realised in the 2018 BumbleBee movie.
This is fully Hasbro and Takara Tomy licensed. ThreeA and 3Zero have produced this stunning detailed sculpt, with a high range of articulation, LED illuminated eye details, die-cast metal parts, and the amazing paint weathering.

Bumblebee stands at 8 inches / 20.32cm tall and features 55 points of articulation, Interchangeable battle-mask & standard head with LED illuminated eyes, interchangeable Stinger Blaster arm, three pairs of interchangeable hands and die-cast metal parts.

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ElectroVoxel is a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have been explored, they often suffer from cost, complexity, assembly and sizing requirements that prevent scaled production of such robots. To address this challenge, we use an actuation mechanism based on electromagnets embedded into the edges of each cube to interchangeably create identically or oppositely polarized electromagnet pairs, resulting in repulsive or attractive forces, respectively. By leveraging attraction for hinge formation, and repulsion to drive pivoting maneuvers, we can reconfigure the robot by voxelising it and actuating its constituent modules - termed Electrovoxels - via electromagnetically actuated pivoting. To demonstrate this, we develop fully untethered, three-dimensional self-reconfigurable robots and demonstrate 2D and 3D self-reconfiguration using pivot and traversal maneuvers on an air-table and in microgravity on a parabolic flight. This paper describes the hardware design of our robots, its pivoting framework, our reconfiguration planning software, and an evaluation of the dynamical and electrical characteristics of our system to inform the design of scalable self-reconfigurable robots.

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ElectroVoxels are robotic cubes that can reconfigure using electromagnets. The cubes don't need motors or propellant to move, and can operate in zero gravity.
Read the technical paper at groups.csail.mit.edu/hcie/files/research-projects/ElectroVoxel/Nisser_ICRA_22_CamReady_0207.pdf

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Pulling inspiration from the natural world, we have developed a trio of robots that can morph their bodies and legs as needed to better crawl, shimmy or swim over difficult terrain.

These new robotic systems are designed to mimic the way biological organisms adapt their shape depending on their life cycle or environment and were developed by a team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The work is described in a new paper published in Nature Communications, which outlines the three robotic types and their different abilities, including gripping, climbing, and amphibious travel.

"Embedded shape morphing for morphologically adaptive robots"

by Jiefeng Sun, Elisha Lerner, Brandon Tighe, Clint Middlemist and Jianguo Zhao
September 27, 2023

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