Printable Modular Robot (PMR)

The Printable Modular Robot is a project that has emerged while Dennis and Florens where working on their final thesis’s at TAMS.

We created a set of very cheap (~25€ p.p.) modules to be printed on any standard 3D-printer.
The modules are driven by RC-servos, controlled by Arduino-Nano boards and connected via magnetic interfaces.

    

The modules can be dynamically reassembled during operation and the robot automatically detects changes in it’s topology, including the pitch/yaw orientation of every module.

For technical details, please take a look into the paper [PDF] thar has been published at the CLAWAR conference 2014 in Poznan,
or the Industrial Robot International Journal article [PDF][DOI]. [Slides] are also available.
A short video shows the whole process of developing and assembling the robot. Additionally, there is a video from the ICRA tutorial 2014, available on Youtube.

If you are interested to work with our design or code, please use the Github repositorys for:

• the hardware design (.stl and .scad files) https://github.com/TAMS-Group/pmr-model
• the C source code we created to operate the snake https://github.com/TAMS-Group/pmr-code

You can also find the stl files on Thingiverse.