Run for your lives, self-assembling robots are the wave of the future! Okay, obviously that’s an overstatement, there’s no Transformers ready to overthrown mankind, just yet. What the folks at MIT do have though is a separating and reassembling robotic cubes, and they’re pretty cool looking.
Self-assembling robotic modules aren’t entirely knew but what has MIT’s John Romanishin, Daniela Rus, and Kyle Gilpin excited is the simplicity of a new design. Called M-Blocks, each block is self-contained with no external parts and possess the power to roll and even leap off the floor! All of this is possible with the use of magnets on the block’s edges that use the aligning poles to snap apart or together.
While this is just the beginning, it’s easy to see from watching the video how further down the line these robotic cubes could be used together in a modular robot for a variety of functions. A couple thousand cubes in the room together and you’ve got a Decepticon in no time.
Via Singularityhub