Real Paper Robots

[Szdfan]

From Slate.com's "Future Tense" column:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_t...kumar_and_printing_your_own_robot_video_.html

Led by MIT professor Daniela Rus, a five-year project is underway to create an easy-to-use system that lets anybody customize a robot and print it out within 24 hours. If you want a robot for home use, you would just head to a local printing store, select a blueprint from a set of designs, customize it to fit your needs, and pick up the final product the next day.

Materials like paper would keep costs and production times down. Further, it wouldn’t require too many technical skills. According to Wired’s Gadget Lab:

As it stands now, a robot would come pre-programmed to perform a set of tasks, but if a user wanted more advanced actions, he or she could build up those actions using the bot’s basic capabilities. That advanced set of commands could be programmed in a computer and beamed wirelessly to the robot. And as voice parsing systems get better, Rus thinks you might be able to simply tell your robot to do your bidding.

Article includes an embedded video from Wired showing these robots in action.

 

[Zathros]

Interesting article. I don't know why these guys don't believe in wheels? Using conductive Ink pens (Radio Shack has them,they're good for fixing remote control pads), I have made circuit boards out of paper. Maintaining a good contact is difficult though. This looks like a standard printed board that can be programmed. There are many small printed boards. One called a 'Basic Stamp" is sued and can be daisy chained. That together with "Raspberry Pi' would give your robots the ability to display messages' You could send it to your wife and sask, "Get me a cup of coffee!" At which point my wife would probably drop kick the robot back towards me telling me to get my own, but I digress..Very Interesting!

When we were kids,we used to make simple circuit board by rubbing pencils and making the traces with the graphite, which conducts electricity really well. Making a box for a battery, it became easy to make a notebook that would open with it was closed. Being a kid, we could not imagine having the light source on when you were reading, but I don't think that would have been too hard to make.

These could make some interesting models. Adding some functionality to them. Great find!

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