Researchers’ New System Optimizes the Shape of Robots for Traversing Various Terrain Types
Choosing the right shape will be vital for your robot's ability to traverse a particular terrain. And it's impossible to build and test every potential form. But now an MIT-developed system makes it possible to simulate them and determine which design works best.
You start by telling the system, called RoboGrammar, which robot parts are lying around your shop -- wheels, joints, etc. You also tell it what terrain your robot will need to navigate. And RoboGrammar does the rest, generating an optimized structure and control program for your robot.
The advance could inject a dose of computer-aided creativity into the field. "Robot design is still a very manual process," says Allan Zhao, the paper's lead author and a PhD student in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He describes RoboGrammar as "a way to come up with new, more inventive robot designs that could potentially be more effective."
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