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Friday, February 15, 2013

Robotic shipping containers may be portable infrastructure of the future

A team at the University of Pennsylvania is working on a robotic project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to eventually create robotic floating containers that can form bridges, runways or even island.

At this stage, Professor Mark Yim and his students are playing with a big fleet of small robotic boats in a pool, getting them to cooperate to form all sorts of useful structures. UPenn has over 100 of these boats, each one of which is controlled with a Gumstix and uses four separate motors to enable omnidirectional movement and zero-radius turns.

DARPA wants to scale this system up to boats the size of shipping containers, which are cheap, accessible, and easy to transport and manage. Floating robotic containers will create as instant, portable infrastructure wherever there is a need.

The idea is to fill a container ship with these modules and dump them all into the water near a disaster zone, tell them to form a runway, and they'd all dart around to form a big flat stabilized runway. When you're through, or you need something else, the modules will unlock themselves and reconfigure into something else or line up to get collected and moved on to wherever else they're needed.

DARPA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military.

For more of the IEEE Spectrum story: spectrum.ieee.org

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