Ackerman, Evan. “MIT’s HERMIT Crab Robots Cdan Do Anything You Shell Them To.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, IEEE, 17 Mar. 2021, 17:24 GMT, spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/mits-hermit-crab-robots-can-do-anything-you-shell-them-to.
Article title:
MIT’s HERMIT Crab Robots Can Do Anything You Shell Them To
Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
My summary of the article:
MIT's HERMIT robots are revolutionary in many aspects, the most iconic one being the fact that it is designed for many different types of work and functions. The reason that this attribute of HERMITs make it such a revolutionary robot is simply due to the fact that many robots are not like this at all. Many robots have a specialized task that it performs extremely well at. For example, industrial robots at a car factory may perform manufacturing automobile doors brilliantly, and another group of industrial robots in the same factory may perform manufacturing engines brilliantly, and so on.
A problem that can be easily identified from such specialization of tasks is that new robots may be needed to be entirely designed and programmed from scratch when a new task is identified for undertaking that specific task. This is highly inefficient, both in terms of exploiting material and human resources. The HERMIT robots provide insight towards how a solution to this problem could look like.
Basically, the robots operate by switching in and out of mechanical shells. The mechanical shells are all that needs to be designed in order to 'change' the type of task that the robots must undertake. Since all the electronics are in the individual robots without the shells, it is relatively easy to produce the mechanical shells using a 3D printer. Moreover, the HERMIT robots could be scaled up by adding more HERMITs to one another. The video below shows how different combinations of HERMITs could create an actual, operating robot in action that can be used to undertake a given task.
Video: MIT Media Lab
My response to the article:
The idea of a one-for-all robot sounds amazing. I mean, how great would it be to have multiple robots combining with one another to create literally any possible type of robot for any real life task? In fact, the HERMIT robots are very similar in idea and approach to the FreeBOTs that I have discussed in Tech & Engineering Review #17. The FreeBOTs were circular metal spheres that resembled a lot of the "Microbots" that appear in the Disney film "Big Hero 6". Compared to the tasks that Microbots were able to accomplish such as climbing stairs, HERMITs are able to undertake more sophisticated tasks thanks to their arsenal of diverse and useful mechanical shells such as Theo Jansen's strandbeest legs, fans, grabbers, and vertical and rotational axis motors. I personally believe that the HERMITs are a great first approach to such a technological advancement as ambitious as an one-for-all robot. According to the researchers that claim that up to 70 robots can be controlled at once, it would be very pleasing to watch the various different combinations that the robots can be arranged into and the tasks that they are able to undertake as a whole.
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