MIT researchers create system that designs custom robots based on terrains

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created a system called RoboGrammar that designs robots based on materials available and the terrain that needs to be navigated.

Despite the variety of tasks robots are used for, they tend to be similar in design, the paper’s lead author Allan Zhao said, adding RoboGrammar could be used to come up with inventive designs.

According to engadget, The advance could inject a dose of computer-aided creativity into the field. “Robot design is still a very manual process,” says Allan Zhao, the paper’s lead author and a PhD student in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He describes RoboGrammar as “a way to come up with new, more inventive robot designs that could potentially be more effective.”

Zhao is the lead author of the paper, which he will present at this month’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference. Co-authors include PhD student Jie Xu, postdoc Mina Konaković-Luković, postdoc Josephine Hughes, PhD student Andrew Spielberg, and professors Daniela Rus and Wojciech Matusik