Robot Melts Its Bones to Change How It Walks

In a paper published in IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters, Zhao introduces a new kind of small reconfigurable robot that relies on a plastic structure that can be selectively melted and re-hardened on the fly to change joint configurations and resulting motion. IEEE Spectrum: You say in the paper that you’re interested in leveraging the same body parts for different functions in the way that many animals do, but animals can’t reconfigure the structures of their bodies in the way that your robots can. To circumvent such a problem, we choose to reconfigure the mechanical structure of a robot, which can also achieve multiple functional found in animals (different motions for walking, jumping, or swimming, for example).

Source: spectrum.ieee.org