ME Professor Alice Agogino’s BEST Lab Featured on the Discovery Channel

The BEST Lab‘s tensegrity robot research was recently featured on the Discovery Channel’s nightly science magazine, the Daily Planet. The feature contrasted their sleek and faster Rev3 of the Berkeley Tensegrity Robot with Rev1. Both Rev1 and Rev2 use elastic cords and linear actuators to shape shift the tensegrity robot into punctuated rolling motion. Rev3 has distributed intelligence with wireless communication between pods on the six rods in compression. Instead of linear actuators, it uses a spooling system with a motor in each pod to increase or decrease the length and thus tension on the wires.