This Robot Transforms Itself to Navigate an Obstacle Course

When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but the world starts to look more interesting if your hammer can change shape. For the builders of a class of robots called modular self-reconfigurable robots (MSRR), shape-shifting is the first step toward endowing robots with an animal-like adaptability to unknown situations. "The question of autonomy becomes more complicated, more interesting," when robots can change themselves to meet changing circumstances, said roboticist Hadas Kress-Gazit of Cornell University. The key to achieving adaptability for robots rests in centralized sensory processing, environmental perception, and decision-making software, Kress-Gazit and colleagues report this week in a new paper in Science Robotics. The authors claim their new work represents the first time a modular robot has autonomously solved problems by reconfiguring in response to a changing environment.