MIT’s New Modular Robot Is a Real-Life Transformer

Did it ever occur to you that the world’s first real-life Transformer wouldn’t be one big shapeshifting robot but rather thousands of small ones that converge into a whole? Actually, let’s back up a second. Did it ever occur to you that humans would actually create the world’s first Transformer? Well, we did. Or at least MIT scientists did. We’re pretty sure they’re human.

The new device doesn’t look like much at first. Each of its pieces is a tiny, self-sufficient robot made of a couple metal rings and some strips to connect the circuits. However, when you join them together, the millimeter-sized links become a giant chain robot that’s capable of curving and bending into any shape imagineable. The string of parts simply take an input from one end and carry the signal down the line with each link turning left or right as instructed by the program.

“It’s effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes,” explains Neil Gershenfeld, one of the device’s creators and head of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. They call it milli-motein, a sort of portmanteau of the device’s tiny size and the protein structures that it’s designed after.

The really killer innovation at play in the milli-motein isn’t specifically the device’s ability to change shapes but rather the tiny electric motors that allow it to do so. “Conventional electric motors wouldn’t work for two reasons,” Gershenfeld told Fast Company. “They need power to hold their position. (What you’d like is to turn the robot into the shape you want and have it stay there.) And for a conventional electric motor, moving slowly is inefficient. If you stall the motor, all the energy goes into heat.” So Gershenfeld and his team did what any pioneering scientists would do: They got magnets involved.

The milli-motein’s engine is powered by an electromagnet setup. Each of the rings holds a positive charge, unless the robot’s input switches it to negative, causing the direction of the ring to switch positions. Gershenfeld says that this new motor design could be used for anything from powering his little Transformer to replacing the cumbersome hydraulic systems on airplanes.

Ultimately, though, MIT’s Transformer builders want to see this milli-motein idea, though. The robots’ tiny size is just a circumstantial detail for now, and the scientists want to go both bigger and smaller with them by focusing on enlarging the “motein” aspect of the device. They’ve apparently already built a human sized motein machine and are currently working on a nano-sized device that could be used in medical technology. The MIT team says that the future could see both giant and microscopic moteins capable of performing essentially any task that you can program. And hopefully, they won’t be doing anything we don’t tell them to.