![](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/06\/screen-shot-2017-06-01-at-9-49-43-am.png?w=738\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The old song tells us that leg bone is connected to the hip bone how are we to know if the articulated cam can connect to the brushless motor? There are, sadly, no songs designed to tell us how to build robots. Luckily CMU\u2019s Ruta Desai<\/a> has us covered.<\/p>\n His project, \u201cComputational Abstractions for Interactive Design of Robotic Devices,\u201d is essentially a robotics toolkit. You see a set of parts that you can drag and drop to connect together and a complex physics engine ensures that wheels go where they work the best and motors are connected properly. This means you can\u2019t create a robot that will fall over as soon as it moves forward. The tool also recommends parts to add to your robot to make it work better or be more structurally sound.<\/p>\n \u201cThe process of creating new robotic systems today is notoriously challenging, time-consuming and resource-intensive,\u201d said co-creator of the project Stelian Coros. \u201cIn the not-so-distant future, however, robots will be part of the fabric of daily life and more people \u2014 not just roboticists \u2014 will want to customize robots. This type of interactive design tool would make this possible for just about anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n In short this project makes it easier to put together the building blocks of real robotics and simulate what will happen when you activate the motors and sensors. In one test they created a robotic puppy that, after simulation, they \u201cdiscovered could only walk forward and not sideways.\u201d They tweaked it a bit and then built the project, finding they now had a puppy that could walk sideways.<\/p>\n