A CSAIL team's printable robots design-database won the Best Paper award at last week's 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014).
The system - which was developed by Ankur Mehta, Joseph DelPreto, Benjamin Shaya and Daniela Rus - allows non-experts to easily create printable foldable robots from high-level structural specifications.
A user simply selects electromechanical components from a library of basic building blocks and pre-designed mechanisms, then connects them to define custom robot assemblies. The system then generates complete mechanical drawings suitable for fabrication, instructions for the assembly of electronics, and software to control and drive the final robot.
