Cornell scientists Hod Lipson, Viktor Zykov and Efstathios Mytilinaios have published a report in Nature detailing their self-assembling robots. From the Cornell news release:
Their robots are made up of a series of modular cubes -- called "molecubes" -- each containing identical machinery and the complete computer program for replication. The cubes have electromagnets on their faces that allow them to selectively attach to and detach from one another, and a complete robot consists of several cubes linked together. Each cube is divided in half along a long diagonal, which allows a robot composed of many cubes to bend, reconfigure and manipulate other cubes. For example, a tower of cubes can bend itself over at a right angle to pick up another cube.The cubes have a degree of freedom along the diagonal which makes the stacks amazingly wiggly. The video they've posted (wmv, no sound) is hypnotic to watch, and shows one stack of three aseembling into two stacks of three and then turning each into four. This is all these robots can do, but I'm still glad the computer program will probably just crash if it mutates! Otherwise you wouldn't want to leave a pile of these cubes alone for very long.
