US Researchers have developed modular robots that can assume different shapes in order to perform various tasks.
General-purpose robots have many limitations however. They can be expensive and cumbersome, and they often accomplish only a single type of task.
A Cornell University-led team said these modular robots that can perceive their surroundings, make decisions and autonomously assume different shapes in order to perform various tasks, the German news agency (dpa) reported.
The robots are composed of wheeled, cube-shaped modules that can detach and reattach to form new shapes with different capabilities.
The modules have magnets to attach to each other, and Wi-Fi to communicate with a centralized system.
The Science Daily website cited Hadas Kress-Gazit, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, who said: "This is the first time modular robots have been demonstrated with autonomous reconfiguration and behavior that is perception-driven."
"I want to tell the robot what it should be doing, what its goals are, but not how it should be doing it. I don't actually prescribe, as all these decisions are made autonomously by the robot," Gazit explained.
