Today in our continuing series entitled “Robots That Will Eventually Drink The Liquid From Your Eyeball In Your Sleep” we present the STAR.V3, a superfast, 3D-printed robot that can squeeze itself down to fit underneath a door and/or scuttle quickly away as soon as it steals your precious juices.
While the juicing feature has not yet been enabled in the robot, researchers at Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have been able to create this “sprawl tuned autonomous robot” AKA STAR using 3D printed pieces. David Zarrouk, Andrew Pullin, Nick Kohut, and Ronald Fearing created the robot out of a number of simple, easily replaceable and biomimetic parts.
The robot can move up to 5.2 meters per second and it is especially quick on smooth surfaces. A simple control board and simple motors control the star-shaped wheels and collapsible arms.
The team aims to make it a sort of field-repairable search and rescue bot. Because you can print parts for it quickly using almost any 3D printer and it weighs only a few grams, you can carry a few of them and not worry if they break on transport. You can read a bit more about the robot here or you can just sleep with one eye open in hopes of catching this little thing before it catches you.