9357738 Chirikjian This award funds the first-year base amount of a five-year NSF Young Investigator Award. The research goals consist of two separate projects. First, the kinematics, motion planning, and design of mechanisms with `binary actuators' will be investigated. Robots with binary (on-off) actuators have a finite number of states. Major benefits of binary actuated manipulators are that they can be operated without extensive feedback control, task repeatability is very high, and two-state actuators are generally very inexpensive, thus resulting in low cost robots for industrial use. Second, the design and coordination of `metamorphic' robotic systems for use in unknown environments will be investigated. A metamorphic robot is a collection of independent modules each of which has the ability to locomote over adjacent modules. The morphology of the collection of modules changes as a function of the collective motion. Such self-reconfigurability potentially gives metamorphic robots unique abilities. For instance, modules can `flow' into crevasses unreachable by fixed morphology robots, or grow to form structures which envelop objects and form stable grasps.
