Photo credit: Eric Sucar
There are modular laptops, the Polymega game console, and then StickBot. Developed by UPenn Ph.D. candidate Devin Carroll, this modular robot is made from actual sticks, circuitry, actuators, a microcontroller, and a motor driver. The robot is controlled by a smartphone app that Carroll designed, which allows it to pivot from sticks as legs in ‘crawler mode’ to using them as arms.
It’s powered by AA batteries that are connected by a maze of wires and blinking lights, which drive StickBot’s wooden stick arms. These sticks basically thump up and over to power the robot across the table at Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab. This flexible system can be reconfigured in a variety of ways, or in StickBot’s case, components can be added, adjusted, or discarded as needed.
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StickBot is a robotic system that is intended to provide users with a large amount of flexibility at an extremely low cost and we do that by leveraging the modularity of found materials. We have a bunch of tree branches or sticks and we’re able to assemble them into truss structures in different configurations. In doing so, we can get things like a crawler robot or a gripper robot or really, anything you can imagine. Behind StickBot is the ability to reconfigure things and to make it extremely affordable,” said Devin Carroll, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at UPenn.
