By Evan Ackerman
Robots are well known to be specialists, doing best when they’re designed for one very specific task without much of an expectation that they’ll do anything else. This is fine, as long as you’re OK with getting a new specialist robot every time you want something different done robotically. Making generalist robots is hard, but what’s less hard is enabling a generalist to easily adapt into different kinds of specialists, which we humans do all the time when we use tools.
While we’ve written about tool using robots in the past, roboticists at the MIT Media Lab have taken inspiration from the proud and noble hermit crab to design a robot that’s able to effortlessly transition from a total generalist to highly specialized and back again, simply by switching in and out of clever, custom made mechanical shells.