Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan have created a chair that has the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct itself. The robot chair can fall apart spontaneously, and then drag itself across the floor and reassemble.
see video here
Implant Matrix is an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future. A network of mechanisms reacts to human occupants as erotic prey. The structure responds to human presence with subtle grasping and sucking motions, ingesting organic materials and incorporating them into a new hybrid entity.
Implant Matrix is composed of interlinking filtering ‘pore’ within a lightweight structural system. Primitive interactive systems employ capacitance sensors, shape-memory alloy wire actuators and distributed microprocessors. The matrix is fabricated by laser cutting direct from digital models. Implant Matrix was installed at the InterAccess Media Arts Centre in Toronto.
More information here
Researchers at the IST have developed a network of self-organising and self-assembling robots. This system composed of a number of simple, insect-like robots, built out of relatively cheap components, capable of sel-assembling and self-organising to adapt to environments. This novel approach finds its theoretical roots in recent studies in swarm intelligence, that is, in studies of the self-organising and self-assembling capabilities shown by social insects and other animal societies.
more information here
Researchers at the Polymorphic Robotics laboratory have designed and manufactured a modular robot called the SuperBot. SuperBot is a modular robot that consists of many reconfigurable modules that can demonstrate multifunction and reconfiguration for running, climbing, structuring, and many other activities in real environments.
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Researchers at the Dartmouth Robotics Laboratory have tested a number of different algorithms on digital models to test how algorithms are able to adapt to different types of variable input. The idea is that simple algorithms that work for an idealized system can then be instantiated on to a variety of actual systems while retaining the correctness of the generic algorithms.
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Researchers at the Darmouth Robotics Laboratory have developed a network of mobile robots capable of communicating with each other to accomplish different states. They have created a number of algorithms that can organize and reorganize the mobile robots.
See link here
Researchers at the Dartmouth Robotics Laboratory have developed a module capable of reconfiguring at a large scale. This self-reconfiguring robot consists of a set of identical modules that can dynamically and autonomously reconfigure in a variety of shapes, to best fit the terrain, environment, and task.
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Video link here.
Stephen Gage and Will Thorn described a new type of robotic fleet that, in the future, ‘would be to patrol building facades, regulating energy usage and indoor conditions. Basic duties include closing unattended windows, checking thermostats, and adjusting blinds. But the machines would also “gesture meaningfully to internal occupants” when building users “are clearly wasting energy,” and they are described as “intrinsically delightful and funny.”’
See article here.
Researchers at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto have made a number of very interesting simulations for how objects could reconfigure to create new shapes. These are very useful showing the number of moves and relative time required to reconfigure swarms of objects.
Researchers at Xerox Parc have designed a reconfigurable robotic system based on the rhombic dodecahedron. While no working models of this system have been created (that we know of) the possibility of what could be done with this system is immense. Self similar modules have the ability to rotate around each other based on prescribed rules.
This projects was used as a precedent for a spatial project based on the rhombic dodecahedron module by Robert Miles Kemp for his thesis project on Meta-Morphic Reconfigurable Robots.
More information can be found here.
Video link here.