Skip to content The vibrobot – a vibrating motor and battery attached to the head of a brush – isn’t truly a robot, since its movement can’t be controlled, but it’s whetted the interest of many future roboticists. With a clever control method , though, it is in fact possible to drive them in any desired direction while using only one motor. [Namaskar Mitro] based the design of this robot on this research paper ; if the vibrating motor is mounted at an angle above the base of the robot, it causes the bot to rotate, and if the motor is mounted off-center from the center of mass, the robot moves in a circle. Crucially, reversing the direction of the motor’s rotation reverses the direction of the robot’s rotation. By rapidly switching the direction of rotation, the bot can move in a series of short, shallow arcs which approximate a straight line. The robot which [Namaskar] built was based on an ESP-01F microcontroller, which let it be remote-controlled over Wi-Fi.…