The folks at MIT are always cooking up some interesting technology, and the latest we’ve come across is the self-stacking M-Blocks. Each little cube contains a radio, a printed circuit board, a flywheel that can spin up to 20,000 rpm, and magnets that line the edges. With these, the cubes are able to move around on their own and stack themselves in all kinds of different configurations. Heck, they’re even able to make small leaps!
Currently only a proof of concept, it’s possible that the guts be one day miniaturized enough to allow for more complex structures to be built using only an assembly program and the self-stacking building blocks themselves. Human intervention barely required.
“These proof-of-concept robots are the first step in a project that will hopefully lead to the development of modular robot blocks that are cable of generic lattice-based self-reconfiguration.”
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
