For years, a group of researchers has been working on origami robot — reconfigurable robot that would be able to fold itself into arbitrary shape.
Folding robot is nothing new, but scientists from Harvard and MIT (MIT recently successfully developed robotic fingers & 3D ice cream printer) have taken it to the next level, by designing one that assembles itself and walks away to do its job with zero human input. Starting from a flat plane, the tiny robot can fold itself into a three-dimensional form, and start traveling in less than five minutes.
“Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” researcher Robert J. Wood said in a press release.
“We have achieved a long-standing personal goal to design a machine that can assemble itself,” Daniela Rus, an MIT roboticist and one of the study’s authors, said about the robot.
Origami (from ori meaning “folding”, and kami meaning “paper” (kami changes to gami due to rendaku) is the traditional Japanese art of 
paper folding, which started in the 17th century AD at the latest and was popularized outside of Japan in the mid-1900s. It has since evolved into a modern art form. The goal of this art is to transform a flat sheet of paper into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques, and as such the use of cuts or glue are not considered to be origami.
The robots start out as a flat sheet of paper and polystyrene plastic (which you most likely know as Shrinky Dinks) etched with strategically placed hinges. Since those materials aren’t enough to make a full-fledged robot, the scientists also placed a flexible circuit board in the middle (with circuits extending to every hinge), two motors, a microcontroller and two batteries. It’s the microcontroller that’s in charge of activating the circuits to produce heat on command, which then leads to the flat sheet folding itself like an origami. When the hinges cool after a few minutes and the polystyrene hardens, the microcontroller commands the robot to scuttle away and do its thing.
The same team of scientists created a foldable robot worm and a robot lamp in the past years, but this is their first creation that’s capable of performing a function after it builds itself. It’s far from being perfect, though, and still has a ways to go before anyone can use it for a particular purpose. For instance, the assembly process is triggered by slotting a battery in, but the researchers plan to modify the robot so that it starts folding itself based on environmental cues like changes in pressure or temperature. Also, the mechanical critters could use a different polymer other than polystyrene, one that requires less heat to start folding. At this point in time, the prototypes are prone to bursting into flames, since they use so much energy — in fact, just the assembly itself depletes a whole AA battery.
0ne fascinating thing about this process is how cheap it is. The robot itself, all told, only costs about $100 to make as a prototype. And building a robot to function in a particular way takes little more than an hour. The research team also plans on experimenting with other polymers to enable different types of folding and function.
When more applications have been developed for the robot, the team envisions a commercial application in which people are able to buy cheap, functional robots on demand, which can be easily stored in a flat shape until they need to be used.
“You would be able to come in, describe what you need in fairly basic terms, and come back an hour later to get your robotic helper,” Wood noted in the release.
Another potential application discussed by the team might be for space applications, where many of the robots are stored easily in their flat shape, then deployed into orbit or to other planets, autonomously fold themselves and go about the tasks they need to complete. recently researchers also focusing on self-assembled furniture.
Now it’s just a matter of time to build the fiction transformers in real.
Origami robot is self-assembled and moves without human intervention
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