Machine Heart Reports
Editor: Zhang Qian
How can a robot with limited movement master countless abilities? Researchers from MIT drew inspiration from hermit crabs that change their homes and developed a shell-switching robot.
Robots are typically specialized tools that excel at specific tasks they are designed for, but few robots can perform multiple tasks. Completing various tasks often requires multiple robots.
MIT researchers drew inspiration from the hermit crab to design a multifunctional robot—HERMITS. This robot consists of two parts: a small cube that can move independently and a shell that cannot move on its own. Every time it changes its shell, the small robot can switch its task mode.
One moment it’s holding a pad for its owner, and the next it can transform into a fan.
This mobile cube is a two-wheeled robot called Toio, developed by Sony. It can locate itself on a special mat using infrared technology and can interact with each other and other objects through a central controller. Toio is modifiable, but its positioning has always been limited to toys.
Sony’s Toio robot released in June 2017.
Ken Nakagaki, a robotics expert from MIT Media Lab, made some modifications to Toio: he added a small servo motor that can poke a tiny needle out from the top of the robot. This small improvement gives Toio immense power, enabling it to change shells just like a hermit crab.
Once it dons a shell, the small cube can interact with the shell to perform various tasks. These shells do not involve any electronic devices and can be manufactured using 3D printing.
The small robot with a shell on.
The design of the “shell” allows you to unleash your imagination to the fullest.
A plethora of shell-switching modes.
Currently, researchers can control over 70 robots simultaneously using 14 Raspberry Pis. While using Raspberry Pi may not be the best solution, it can reduce the cost of HERMITS while increasing its usability. As demonstrated by MIT, the imaginative space that this hermit crab robot can carry is limitless.
The paper on HERMITS was also included in the top conference on human-computer interaction, UIST 2020:
Paper link:https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2020/10/21/HERMITS_UIST2020_ACM.pdf
We live in an era where robots are becoming increasingly abundant; vacuum robots and drones have become standard in our lives. The significance of the HERMITS project is that it broadens the design thinking of robots, showing us that robots can achieve multiple functions through simple “shell-switching.” Perhaps one day, our drone robots can emerge from their drone shells at home and switch into the “clothes” of a vacuum robot to continue working.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/mits-hermit-crab-robots-can-do-anything-you-shell-them-to
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/hermits/overview/
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