MIT's 'Walking Motor' Could Be The Future Of Robots

Robotic is the new tech trend worldwide, industries and researchers alike are actively searching for new ways to improve the way we currently build robots. And apparently, the researchers from MIT’s solution to this is to completely rethink the way we build them.

'Walking Robot'

The researchers have created a type of ‘walking’ robot that met three core criterions of a great production model robots: Customisable, fast, and inexpensive.

In fact, it is less referred to as a 'robot' than a 'walking motor' due to the rudimentary nature of the machine.

The robot is made out of five modules only: A couple of rigid, durable, and flexible parts, along with some electromagnetic parts composed of a coil and a magnet. Everything works together to allow the robot to move an appendage that’s responsible for much of the robot’s movement and physical work without the need of complex parts and designs: Crawl, grip, push, pull, e.t.c. It’s similar to a set of mildly sophisticated Lego you can configure to do the job you have in mind.

Not only that, but it is also quite powerful for its size and relative simplicity. The new design can lift a total weight seven times its own. If you need heavier lifting, you just need to add some specialized parts to increase its payload capacity. More importantly, depends on the project, you can scale up or scale down the parts to tackle from very large to very small projects with ease. It is not until the introduction of this design that motors can work without the needs of specialized methods to get them to operate at their maximum efficiency.

Transition

No matter how impressive this all sounds, according to MIT, this is just the ‘first step’. The researchers, similar to most who hear about this project and its results, see vast potentials in the design. It could contribute to the global effort to create a sort of standardized robots that users can assemble for some task-specific needs without having to design a completely new robot each time. The design, if made popular, would also make super small, or extremely large robotic projects more prevalent.

In conclusion, this can be the transition of robotics from being a niche, expensive, and sophisticated field to something that’s more commonplace and ordinary.