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Then all the underlying electromagnet assignments are computed for you, and we can put that directly onto the microcontroller.” “So we created a user interface that lets you specify which ElectroVoxel should pivot in what direction. “When you have more than two or three ElectroVoxels, it becomes hard to address each electromagnet individually and predict what will happen,” says Nisser. Once that pivoting is complete, you can use two separate pairs of electromagnets to attract each other and hold the faces of the two cubes together.ĮlectroVoxels are modular robotic cubes that use embedded electromagnets to move. You can then use another pair of electromagnets polarized in the same direction to repel each other and perform a pivoting maneuver.

When a pair of electromagnets in a cube are polarized oppositely, they attract each other, creating a hinge. “It’s like a permanent magnet, except you can change the polarity depending on the direction of the current.”ĮlectroVoxel blocks move by either pivoting to a block it shares an edge with or traversing the face of one block to another. “When you send a current through an electromagnet, the polarization depends on the direction in which you send the current,” Nisser says. “You can think of ElectroVoxels as voxels with electromagnets embedded in them,” he says.Īn ElectroVoxel cube indeed has an electromagnet-a ferrite core wrapped with copper wire-embedded into each of its 12 edges. Due to copyright reasons, however, the team decided against it and settled on combining the term “electromagnet” with “voxel,” a volumetric pixel that’s the 3D equivalent of a pixel. student in the human-computer interaction group at MIT CSAIL and lead author on the paper. “I originally wanted to call them Transformers because they’re essentially robots that can change their shape,” says Martin Nisser, a Ph.D. The accompanying paper will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May. Scientists at CSAIL have created what they call ElectroVoxels, modular robotic cubes that use embedded electromagnets to move. Self-assembling and self-reconfiguring robots depicted in films like Transformers are becoming closer to reality, thanks to a team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

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