This Adafruit ItsyBitsy-Powered "Transformer Bot" Shifts Into 1,000 Shapes with Just Three Motors

Inspired by origami, this cube-based robot could one day serve as a reconfigurable lunar exploration and colonization vessel.

Gareth Halfacree
3 months agoRobotics / 3D Printing

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created a "transformer bot" that uses origami- and kirigami-inspired cubes, driven by three active motors, to shape-shift into over 1,000 possible configurations.

"The question we're asking is how to achieve a number of versatile shapes with the fewest number of actuators powering the shapeshifting," explains co-corresponding author Jie Yin, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, of the team's research. "Here we use a hierarchical concept observed in nature — like layered muscle fibers — but with plastic cubes to create a transforming robot."

This cubic "transformer bot" has just three motors, yet can shift its shape into more than 1,000 configurations. (📹: Li et al)

The "transformer bot" created by the team uses 32 hollow plastic cubes, in its largest "Level 2" configuration, is capable of reconfiguring itself into more than 1,000 different shapes, while driven by just three servo motors — each under the control of an Adafruit ItsyBitsy nRF52840 Express microcontroller. By doing so, it can move in any direction and carry a load up to three times its own weight.

"We think these can be used as deployable, configurable space robots and habitats," claims co-first author Antonio Di Lallo of the team's creation. "It's modular, so you can send it to space flat and assemble it as a shelter or as a habitat, and then disassemble it."

The project builds on earlier work, published last month, in which the cubes were used to construct a functional computer — using the position of the cubes, pushed up or down, to represent a zero or a one, with the potential to expand the system to a point where each cube could represent five or more different states.

There are improvements still to be made, though, even as the team experiments with a large-scale variant built using cardboard boxes. "We want to make a more robust structure that can bear larger loads," says co-corresponding author Yanbin Li. "If we want a car shape, for example, how do we design the first structure that can transform into a car shape? We also want to test our structures with real-world applications like space robots."

The team's work has been published in the journal Nature Communications under open-access terms.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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