Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden presented in this paper is a distributed multi-robot system capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface. Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-the-art rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group. The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its education-oriented user interface.

This work presents a script-based development environment aimed at allowing users to easily design and create mechanical bodies for folded plastic robots. The origami-inspired fabrication process is inexpensive and widely accessible, and the tools developed in this work allow for open source design sharing and modular reuse. Designs are generated by recursively combining mechanical components — from primitive building blocks, through mechanisms and assemblies, to full robots — in a flexible yet well-defined manner. This process was used to design robotic elements of increasing complexity up to a multi-degree-of-freedom compliant manipulator arm, demonstrating the power of this system. The developed system is extensible, opening avenues for further research ultimately leading to the development of a complete robot compiler.

Designing and fabricating new robotic systems is typically limited to experts, requiring engineering background, expensive tools, and considerable time. In contrast, to facilitate everyday users developing custom robots for personal use, this work presents a new system to easily create printable foldable robots from high-level structural specifications. A user merely needs to select electromechanical components from a library of basic building blocks and pre-designed mechanisms, then connect them to define custom robot assemblies. The system then generates complete mechanical drawings suitable for fabrication, instructions for the assembly of electronics, and software to control and drive the final robot. Several robots designed in this manner demonstrate the ability and versatility of this process.