Into the Fold
Engineers are transforming space exploration with robotics.
As the United States contemplates the roadmap of its future in space travel, a team of College of Engineering researchers has gotten on board with helping devise an efficient solution for transportation.
The team has built a collection of 32 3D-printed cubes connected to one another with hinges, allowing them to move as a unit and form more than 1,000 configurations. The cubes, arranged in eight rows of four, are powered by three motors and controlled remotely by a Bluetooth signal.
“We want to try to minimize the motors that are needed to achieve the highest number of possible configurations,” says Antonio Di Lallo, a postdoctoral research scholar working on the project.
The researchers were inspired by the Japanese art of origami. They chose the cube shape because of its symmetry and ability to be hinged. “Traditional origami is just paper folding, so you see the creases,” says Jie Yin, a mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor who was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in January. “This idea shares the same idea as folding [but with] rotation.”
The team admits that not all of the more than 1,000 configurations will be useful. But their hope is that most could enable NASA researchers to unlock easier ways to transport loads and imagine applications on a surface. “NASA has been asking for research on space structures,” says Yanbin Li ’22 PHD, a postdoctoral research scholar. He adds that the success of the team’s design is that it can go from one basic flat shape into many others. That could help NASA, Yin says, form the robotic cubes into bridges, a tunnel or a shelter, just to name a few, on the moon or Mars.
The team is scaling up its design, with the current iteration about the size of a cardboard packing box. But as they scale up, they must consider the weight of the structure with the motors. If that increases, so will the complexity of the system. “The least amount of variables you have to control,” says Di Lallo, “the most reliable the system will be.”
Watch the robot in action here.
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