They create a robot that can fold like an Ikea piece of furniture

The origami-shaped robot that surpasses any Ikea furniture due to its versatility.

Robotics continues to advance by leaps and bounds, not only to make life easier for us on earth, but also in space.

A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have created an origami-inspired robot that is capable of turning into a large number of shapes and intended for space exploration.

The robot is called Mori3 and can walk and pose on all four limbs and even roll once folded into a ring.

“Our goal with Mori3 is to create a modular, origami-like robot that can be assembled and disassembled at will depending on the environment and the task at hand.“, said Jamie Paikdirector of the EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory and co-author of a new article published in the journal Nature.

A challenge for researchers

But this polygonal shape of the robotposed quite a challenge for researchers, who had to rethink many of their theories from scratch.

“We had to rethink the way we understand roboticssaid the co-inventor Christoph Belkepostdoctoral researcher at robotics in the EPFL. “These robots they can change their own shape, bond with each other, communicate, and reconfigure themselves to form functional, articulated structures“.

After this first version of the robot, they are now investigating whether they can join several robots of this type to make it much more useful.