More on SMORES

The ModLab’s transforming robotic system, known as “SMORES-EP,” is taking the world by storm. Along with colleagues at Cornell, the Penn Engineering team published a new study detailing their reconfigurable robot in the journal Science Robotics yesterday.

In “This Robot Transforms Itself to Navigate an Obstacle Course,” IEEE Spectrum’s Lucas Laursen provides some outside context for the authors’ accomplishments:

The ability of the robotic system to integrate perception, high-level planning, and modular hardware is the main step forward in this research, says roboticist Pinhas Ben-Tzvi of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg: “Given a high-level task specification, a modular robot autonomously explores an unknown environment, decides when and how to reconfigure, and manipulates objects to complete its task.”

The journal Nature also put together an explainer on the modular robot, in “Transforming robot changes shape at will”