A Joint Effort in Modular Robotics

Over the past few years, electrical engineering student Nobel Das has made a lot of robots with very different form factors. Ranging from spiders to snakes and arms, each of these robots required a lot of design work and effort to build. But as Das was daydreaming and sketching in class one day, he came to the realization that all of his robots could have been built from just a few elementary pieces.

This reminded Das of the Microbots in the movie Big Hero 6, which are tiny robots that can come together to form more complex systems. The idea of creating his own Microbots was very appealing, so he decided to give it a go.

After carefully looking over his sketches and past robot designs, Das found that all of the past designs could be reproduced with just two types of joints — a hinge joint, and a cylindrical revolving joint. But the fictional Microbots are made of a single building block, so Das combined the joints into a single unit that performs both functions. After completing the design, a physical version of it was 3D-printed.

That took care of the mechanical aspect of the build, but the robot would still need electronics and wiring for the control system and environmental sensing. To accommodate these capabilities, a method was designed to facilitate communication between units. Das based the design on network hubs, with an Arduino development board standing in for the central hub. When sent a message, the Arduino relays it to all other units. Each message indicates the intended recipient, so all other units will simply ignore the message.

Das demonstrated how these building blocks could be used to build dog-like and spider-like robots, but in theory, they could be useful for a lot of other designs as well. Be sure to stay tuned to see where this project goes next!