MIT Creates Amazing Self-Folding Origami Robots & Leaping Cheetah Robots

Last Thurs­day, MIT released two stag­ger­ing­ly cool videos. And I don’t think I’m being hyper­bol­ic in say­ing that. Above we have a robot­ic chee­tah that’s “trained” to “see and jump over hur­dles as it runs — mak­ing this the first four-legged robot to run and jump over obsta­cles autonomous­ly.” The chee­tah knows when to jump by using LIDAR — “a visu­al sys­tem that uses reflec­tions from a laser to map ter­rain.” MIT News has more on the tech behind this cre­ation.

Mak­ing almost equal­ly big news is anoth­er MIT inven­tion — a minia­ture origa­mi robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades. As the elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing web­site IEEE Spec­trum explains:

The unfold­ed robot, which is made of a mag­net and PVC sand­wiched between laser-cut struc­tur­al lay­ers (poly­styrene or paper), weighs just 0.31 g and mea­sures 1.7 cm on a side. Once placed on a heat­ing ele­ment, the PVC con­tracts, and where the struc­tur­al lay­ers have been cut, it cre­ates folds.…

Once you’re done mess­ing around, you can dri­ve the robot into a tank of ace­tone and it will entire­ly dis­solve.

One day, if things go accord­ing to plan, these crea­tures will become small enough to per­form impor­tant med­ical tasks with­in your body, and then when they’re done, poof, they’ll be gone. And you’ll have an MIT researcher part­ly to thank.

via Men­tal Floss

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

Junot Díaz’s Syl­labi for His MIT Writ­ing Class­es, and the Nov­els on His Read­ing List

Free Online Engi­neer­ing Cours­es