Smarticle robots built from smaller swarming robots

An accidental discovery about construction staples led to the development of the swarming robots. Nick Gravish, a doctoral student at Georgia Tech working on a project with the Army Research Laboratory, found that if these heavy duty staples were poured into a box with removable sides, they would self-assemble into tower structures that will stay standing even if the box was disassembled. This, he realised, meant that entangling simple structures could lead to the formation of a composite structure with mechanical properties well beyond those of the original structures.

Developing this idea with Prof Dan Goldman, a Georgia Tech physicist, Gravish designed small robots, around 5 cm across, which could be built on a 3D printer and were capable only of one basic action: flapping their arms up and down. However, when five of these smart active particles – or smarticles – are confined in a circle, they begin to nudge each other and form a robophysical system known as a supersmarticle that can move by itself. As the researchers explain in Science Robotics, adding a light or sound sensor to the smarticles allows the supersmarticle to move in response to the stimulus.