TeCoBot: tensegrity robots that team up
Published
Researchers at Colorado State University's Adaptive Robotics Lab have built a small robot from rods and elastic cables that bends like an elephant's trunk, and can link with copies of itself. The work appeared in Nature Machine Intelligence, as covered by Universe Today.
The Tensegrity-based Continuum Robot, or TeCoBot, is about 587 mm long and weighs around 600 grams, according to the article. Its body is four stacked icosahedral modules, each with six lightweight rods held inside a 3D printed stretchy lattice. Three braided cables run through the centre, and small motors at the base pull on them to bend the body in any direction or shorten it to about half its length. The claws at each end can be swapped: a soft-padded one for delicate items, or a gripper that uses a worm gear to hold on without drawing battery power.
A single robot can inch like a caterpillar, roll sideways and climb vertically. Three can grab one another and form shapes, including a wrap around a large pipe and an H-shaped walker that crawls through tight spaces.
Why it matters: wheels struggle with jagged boulders and narrow crevices, which is the terrain of lunar craters and Martian caverns. The caveat is that these robots are still steered by hand over WiFi, which would not work far from Earth. The team plans faster motors and swarm intelligence next.
Would you send a swarm of small robots instead of one big rover?