Autobots Take Form in Harvard Laboratory—How One Engineer Took the Science Out of Science Fiction

If you've recently found yourself scoffing at the newest installment to the Transformers series because of the unrealistic autobots or CGI effects, you may have to eat your words. Finding an unexplored niche in the robotics industry and looking to extract the science out of science fiction, one Harvard student is creating a fully autonomous robot that's not only incredibly functional but also absolutely beautiful.       

Imagine first what you think when you hear the terms autobots and robotics... bet you didn't think of a beautiful crane or even a paper airplane. Integrating a creative concept that makes use of the ancient art of origami, Harvard School of Engineering PhD student Sam Felton introduced the world to his first self-folding autobots in the newest issue of the journal Science.

Transforming from a flat sheet of paper, fully equipped with circuitry and a robotic brain, into a fully-functional robot in under four minutes, Felton's autonomous robots are causing quite a stir amongst the robotics community and the general public.

"To demonstrate the application of [origami] to the fabrication of machines, we developed a crawling robot that folds itself. The robot starts as a flat sheet with embedded electronics, and transforms autonomously into a functional machine" Felton said in his paper published in Science late last month. "To accomplish this, we developed shape-memory composites that fold themselves along embedded hinges. We used these composites to recreate fundamental folded patterns, derived from computational origami, that can be extrapolated to a wide range of geometries and mechanisms."

Addressing several important issues in robotics in terms of complexity, affordability and functionality, Felton's autonomous free-forming robot may help serve several purposes in the near future.      

Using familiarly simple technology that you could find in a Shrinky Dinks toy, the secret behind the transforming origami robots lies in the flexible circuit board and moldable layers of polystyrene bonded to the thin poster paper. As an electrical current is transmitted through the circuit board, resistive circuits heat the polystyrene along the embedded hinges, causing the plastic layer to contract and the joints to fold­-giving the robot structural form.            

Choosing a technically challenging feat in creating a robot that would not only self-fold, but also move, researchers are rather impressed that the autonomous robot can assemble and crawl away at a quick rate of 2.1 inches per second. But the development is far from finished.

Felton, who ambitiously took lead of this project as a PhD candidate, has dreams of this technology that surpass more than a mere cheap alternative to 3-D printing-Felton would like for them to have a part in changing human lives.

"Such robots could potentially be sent through a collapsed building or tunnels and then assemble themselves autonomously into their final functional form" Felton says. "Imagine [someday] a ream of dozens of robotic satellites sandwiched together so that they could be sent up to space and then assemble themselves remotely once they get there-they could take images, collect data and more."