Latest excellent podcast from the Robohub team. See more by them here, and thanks to the guys for the ongoing partnership with them which has quadruppled their traffic since we began guest hosting their content.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews John Romanishin from MIT, about his modular robotics project ‘M-Blocks’. M-Blocks are small cubes (5 cm on a side) that have no external actuators, yet they manage to move and even jump. They do this by rotating an internal mass at high speeds then stopping that mass suddenly, which transfers inertia to the cube causing it to move. The rotating mass can change which plane it’s spinning in, allowing the cube to move in any direction. By combining this inertial actuator with permanent magnets, M-Blocks can move over similar robots (or more M-Blocks) and precisely line up. The future of this project is best put by John, who says, “We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand.”
John Romanishin
John Romanishin is currently a graduate student studying mechanical engineering and researching self-reconfigurable modular robots at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory led by Daniela Rus at MIT.
Links:
- Download mp3 (12.6MB)
- Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
- Subscribe to Robots using RSS
- John Romanishin’s website
Robotics podcast, Mobility Transformation Facility, with Edwin Olson
If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking
More about Irish Tech News
Irish Tech News are Ireland’s No. 1 Online Tech Publication and often Ireland’s No.1 Tech Podcast too.
You can find hundreds of fantastic previous episodes and subscribe using whatever platform you like via our Anchor.fm page here: https://anchor.fm/irish-tech-news
If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming Podcast email us at [email protected] now to discuss.
Irish Tech News have a range of services available to help promote your business. Why not drop us a line at [email protected] now to find out more about how we can help you reach our audience.
You can also find and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.