Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots

In 2011, when an MIT senior named John Romanishin proposed a new design for modular robots to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said, "That can't be done." Two years later, Rus showed her colleague Hod Lipson, a robotics researcher at Cornell University, a video of prototype robots, based on Romanishin's design, in action. "That can't be done," Lipson said. In November, Romanishin -- now a research scientist in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) -- Rus, and postdoc Kyle Gilpin will establish once and for all that it can be done, when they present a paper describing their new robots at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts.