Robots are built for a near-endless variety of tasks, yet “they all tend to be very similar in their overall shape and design,” says Zhao. Co-authors include PhD student Jie Xu, postdoc Mina Konaković-Luković, postdoc Josephine Hughes, PhD student Andrew Spielberg, and professors Daniela Rus and Wojciech Matusik, all of MIT. Zhao is the lead author of the paper, which he will present at this month’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference. He describes RoboGrammar as “a way to come up with new, more inventive robot designs that could potentially be more effective.”
“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). The advance could inject a dose of computer-aided creativity into the field. And RoboGrammar does the rest, generating an optimized structure and control program for your robot. You also tell it what terrain your robot will need to navigate. You start by telling the system, called RoboGrammar, which robot parts are lying around your shop - wheels, joints, etc.
But now an MIT-developed system makes it possible to simulate them and determine which design works best. And it’s impossible to build and test every potential form. What shape should that robot be? Should it have two legs, like a person? Or six, like an ant?Ĭhoosing the right shape will be vital for your robot’s ability to traverse a particular terrain.