FoamBot Can Make Its Own Body Parts

Posted on October 19, 2011

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created FoamBot. The FoamBot sprays chemicals that form a hard urethane foam to create a robotic body on the fly. The foam is sprayed by a wheeled Foam spraying cart (the mother robot) onto the limbs, which consist of CKBot modules. This way the robot can construct different shaped robots by spraying foam.

The researchers say a robot like FoamBot could be useful for missions where you have no idea what type of robot you might need ahead of time.

Normally, when robots are designed there is a specific task in mind. Once that task is specified, the designer can choose an appropriate robot shape for performing the task well. Yet for many robotic missions this approach is insufficient. There is a class of missions that by their very nature are Unknown Challenge Missions. In these missions, we must commit robot hardware to the task before knowing exactly what it is that these robots must do. Examples include disaster recovery and other first response tasks, intelligence gathering missions, troop support missions against an adapting adversary, and planetary exploration.

In this first video FoamBot builds a quadruped robot using foam. In the second video, FoamBot makes an ugly, but effective, doorstop. Take a look:

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