Robot Builds Ramp by Randomly Flinging 3,600 Toothpicks

"Materials and Mechanisms for Amorphous Robotic Construction," by Nils Napp, Olive R. Rappoli, Jessica M. Wu, and Radhika Nagpal from Harvard University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was presented at the 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Vilamoura, Portugal.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[MerelyFlowers]

That's some impressive problem solving.

[RomanticPopPunk]

Only if it learned to go around instead lol

[TheHappyWhaleshark]

I don't think the team that built it had efficiency in mind.

[Mike Hanna]

It's a good start, but flinging things to make a big climable pile of things to get over some stuff is not efficient. What would be good would be for the robot to recognise it needs a way up to the top of the box and use the toothpicks or foam to build predesigned, efficient structures capable of carrying the weight of the robot. You'd only need a few hundred toothpicks, however the robot would need to be an order of magnitude more advanced. So you won't see a big version of this building roads

[Pioneer4ik]

Imagine that thing 1000 times bigger constructing roads, intersections, bridges (a part of)

[Insanityredux]

If the robot did this on its own, then that's pretty amazing and with better tools this is useful. On the other hand if someone is controlling this, whoever built this robot should give up now and move onto something they're better at. Maybe pile building?

[B0OM3R98]

So... If the obstacle were 6 inches taller, would it just run out of battery life trying to scale it?

[Sean Watson]

Precursor to Skynet. The next thing it's going to be making ramps out of is human corpses.

[Miner Edgar]

The American way

[Jerald Doerr]

Now if it was smart it would just go around the box! :)

[Tidddlez]

Mirin hard. Strong ramps.

[Andrew Brown]

its so cute