More recently, a group of American engineers managed to prove that 3D printing technology during the assembly of mechanisms is not the fastest and cheapest. To create a robot, they decided to use the Japanese art of origami. In addition, human participation here is practically reduced to zero, since the robot creates itself from flat blanks.
Robot-original has a five-layer structure. Each of the layers is made in accordance with the specified instructions using laser cutting. The middle layer is a network of copper wires located between the sheets of paper. For the manufacture of external layers, special polymers were used that have the ability to remember the form.
The change in the form occurs when heated to 100 degrees. Conductors on the limbs of the robot are wires. The electronic and mechanical part are represented by a microprocessor and two engines.
The robot took less than 5 minutes to self -assembly of composite material. The main feature of the process is “baking”, that is, giving the nodes the mechanism of the desired shape by heating. The experiment ended with the fact that the “self -assembled” robot stood up and began to move independently at a speed of about 5.5 cm/s.
In the future, such a technology can be used for the manufacture, for example, self -gathering furniture or temporary diversity in areas of natural disasters.