Robots build tables and the chairs build themselves

Today we are following up from yesterdays report on 3D Printing Human Tissue & Smart Bandages from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with some real interesting advances in robotics from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL which is the largest research lab here at MIT.

Some Background Information About MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is one of the most famous universities in the world. It spans over a mile of the bank of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across from Boston. Wow. Believe it or not, though, it's only 200 years old, a mere spring chicken compared to the original University of Cambridge in the UK, and Oxford. MIT was founded with the "motto mens et manus", mind and hand. It is that commitment to the academic pursuits alongside manual labour, alongside the mechanical arts and industry and commerce. MIT has been responsible for many of the things that we take for granted. The Gillette razor, transistor radio, electronic ink, the spreadsheet and most importantly of all, condensed soup! If you add up the sales of every company founded by MIT alumni, you'd have the 11th largest economy in the world.

There are over 11,000 students studying here, and more than 1,000 academics. Among them, some of the smartest minds we've ever had. Richard Feynman, physics legend, Kofi Annan, Buzz Aldrin, the guy who invented e-mail, the guy who founded Hewlett Packard, William Hewlett studied here in '36 and founded HP three years later. With 81 Nobel laureates to its name, MIT has squarely set its sights on solving some of the world's biggest and most challenging problems. The issues of the planet are profound, and MIT has the skills and the people who can make a real difference. I think what you see here is a commitment here to making that happen.

Robots Building Furniture

This is where these guys are doing something that all humans hope we won't have to do in the future.. building flat-packed furniture! The robots are actually building furniture, well sort of...slowly building furniture..... It has got the screw in, and that's better than me for a start!

The grip here is just four rubber bands, but as it twists, it manages to grip the table leg properly. Each piece of the furniture has a unique pattern of reflective balls on. The robots do, too, and there are a whole array of sensors around the room, so the computer running this demo knows where everything is. The point of this demonstration is to work towards robots that can work together collaboratively to build structures. It is only a table today, but you can imagine one day it is a whole space station. This is the beginnings of the research into that area. IKEA-bot is just one of countless projects here at MIT

One of the main missions at this lab in particular, is to develop robots that can think for themselves and work together to solve increasingly complex problems. They are achieving this by designing robots that can assemble themselves into complex shapes and even pushing the limits of what we think of as robots. They say they are interested in making soft-bodied robots where the body of the robot looks more like muscles, and for that reason, it's much safer to interact with, and to be around. these robots would also have to have a different range of capabilities. Give me a robot that will play with my cat while I'm at work, or give me a robot that will pick up all the toys from my living room floor and I would be happy.

So where is this project actually at right now? Well they have software that will design electronics and exoskeleton schematics and then print out a cardboard robot body to solve a specific problem. So right now what they have is a system when you describe the solution to the problem, so you would say, in order to be able to accomplish this goal, I need to be able to drive forward, talk and listen. From that description, it will go ahead and give you a first-pass layout of a robot. It will tell you what electronics you need and how to connect them all together, and it will give you the software you can run on the robot itself, a smart-phone interface so that you can control it with whatever phone you have.

Building Real Life Terminator Type Military Robots

Now then there is also the subject of military robots, it is no secret that Google purchased Boston Dynamics a while back, never heard of them? Well watch the video below, and maybe leave a comment after you pick your jaw up off the floor, Scared? you will be!