A team of North Carolina State University engineers has devised an approach that enables a single plastic cubed structure to transform into over 1,000 configurations using three active motors.

Source: North Carolina State University

The researchers explained: “The question we’re asking is how to achieve a number of versatile shapes with the fewest number of actuators powering the shapeshifting. Here we use a hierarchical concept observed in nature — like layered muscle fibres — but with plastic cubes to create a transforming robot.”

To accomplish this, the team 3D printed hollow, plastic cubes and subsequently assembled 36 of them with rotating hinges. The researchers explained that some of the hinges were fixed with metal pins, while the others were activated wirelessly with a motor.

As such, the engineers were able to move the cubes into more than 1,000 shapes — including tunnel-like structures, bridge-like structures and multi-story architectures — using three active motors.

These untethered, origami-inspired, so-called transformer bots can reportedly move forward, backward and sideways by controlling how the structure’s shape changes, the engineers explained. Further, the bots can also transform quickly — from flat, or fully open, to a box-like larger cube, or fully closed — and carry a payload roughly three times their own weight.

The engineers suggest that the transformer bots could potentially be employed as deployable, configurable space robots and habitats, thanks to their modular structures, which can be sent to space flat and later assembled as a shelter or as a habitat.

The transformer bots are detailed in the article, “Adaptive hierarchical origami-based metastructures,” which appears in the journal Nature Communications.

For more information on the transformer bots, watch the accompanying video, which appears courtesy of North Carolina State University.