Here is another robotic concept that makes use of small pieces united to form a bigger one. The modular SuperBot, is in the progress of development by ISI’s Wei-Min Shen, who just recently reported his significant progress to NASA. The SuperBot is each an identical modular units, just like Lego, which can then be plugged into each other to form robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle and even roll.
Each of this SuperBot module can be configured into different systems for different tasks, such as rolling tracks, spiders, centipedes, snakes and long arms etc. Each by itself is a complete robotic module, which has its own power supply, micro-controllers, sensors and funtionalities of movements etc. Shen has a some videos here for the demo of its progress.
The SuperBot concept sounds similar to another robotic concept, the NanoBot, which we’ve seen earlier on. The NanoBot is the robot with nano size, which can be united to form bigger robots. But NanoBot is only a concept for the sci-fi movie, whereas SuperBot is already in good progress of development.
September 27th, 2010 at 4:47 am
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