Tiny, walking motorised robot that could help assemble other robots developed by MIT researchers

The robot consists of five small modular parts that can be assembled and disassembled to create a variety of functional devices

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a small, motorised robot that is able to 'walk' on a surface and could help to assemble other robots.

The ground-breaking project is based on the concept that all forms of life in the world are made up of only 20 amino acids. Taking inspiration from this fact, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld, with his research team, endeavoured to design a kit of some fundamental parts that could be used to assemble almost every type of technological product available in the world today.

After several years of research, the team has come up with a kit of five small modular parts that can be assembled and disassembled to build a variety of functional devices.

One such device built using those modular parts is a tiny 'walking' (we think it's more like a shuffle, but hey - it's movement) motorised robot that can move back and forth across a surface, and also help to assemble other robots.

According to researchers, the five modular parts used to create the robot include both rigid and flexible components, a coil, a magnet and an electromagnet. All can be attached together using a standard connector.

To create the bot, the researchers fixed the five parts to an appendage, which was then able to perform a variety of tasks such as gripping, pushing and crawling, as well as several other tasks that large, complicated robots find difficult to carry out or that require more rigid and complex structures.

According to researchers, their little robot can work in small and tight spaces, which larger robots struggle to reach.

The use of modular parts, which can be assembled and disassembled to build different robots, reduces the need to manufacture expensive machines to perform specific set of tasks.

The five functional parts, when put together, can lift more than seven times their own weight, according to the researchers, and therefore can be used to carry out pretty heavy tasks.

"Standardisation is an extremely important issue in microrobotics, to reduce the production costs and, as a result, to improve acceptance of this technology to the level of regular industrial robots," said Sergej Fatikow, head of the Division of Microrobotics and Control Engineering, at the University of Oldenburg, Germany.

According to Fatikow, this ground-breaking research "addresses assembling of sophisticated microrobotic systems from a small set of standard building blocks, which may revolutionise the field of microrobotics and open up numerous applications at small scales."

The details of the research were presented this week at the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales in Helsinki, Finland.