Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
A collaboration between Stratasys & The Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, which is headed by Skylar Tibbits, a lecturer in the Department of Architecture.
This minuscule robot may be a harbinger of future devices that could fold themselves up into almost any shape imaginable.
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.
Gerkey describes his work at EmTech 2011: A common language for robots Willow Garage PROBLEM: People who want to program robots have had to either write software from scratch or purchase proprietary software that is hard to modify. SOLUTION: