Origami Robot Self-Assembles And Scurries Away

Researchers have built an origami-inspired robot that can fold itself up and scurry away-a prototype of a flexible, self-assembling machine, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The crawler is intended to emulate a sheet of paper - but with a mind of its own.

In the journal Science, the researchers described it as a toy like device.

The prototype is still experimental - but engineering techniques drawn from origami promise the development of pop-up devices that could assemble themselves from flat, composite materials cheaply and efficiently, the researchers said.

Potential applications range from self-assembling satellites to shape-shifting robots that could be used in search-and-rescue missions, writes The Wall Street Journal.

'Anything you can fold and that can support creases is capable of being engineered with these origami design principles,' physicist Jesse L. Silverberg at Cornell University, who wasn't involved in the robot project, said in a statement.

Origami-inspired designs have already been used to create compact packages of solar-power cells that pop open on satellites, cardiac stents and automobile air bags that burst open in accidents.

In the latest innovation, scientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed an origami robot that can fold itself up in about four minutes, turn and walk-without any human intervention, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The robot began as a pattern of creases etched on an 8½-by-11-inch sheet of polystyrene plastic.

Researchers laminated the plastic with a sheet of paper, to add stiffness, before including a flexible electronic circuit board that contains two batteries, two motors and a microcontroller.

An onboard heater warms the plastic, crease by crease, so that it folds in the proper sequence, writes The Wall Street Journal.

'When it tries to shrink, it pulls on the paper and causes it to fold over,' robotics engineer Sam Felton at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Cambridge, Mass., who led the project, said in a statement.

Mr. Felton and his colleagues expect to unveil another experimental origami device next week at a Taiwanese automation conference - a self-folding cube only five millimeters in length.