Transformer robots can be printed on demand in just 13 minutes

From wire to finished product in less than 13 minutes: a new robot-builder is faster than most takeaways. It works by bending wire that already has motors attached into different shapes, using a process its designers call 1D printing. Once the robot has performed its job, it can simply be flattened and fed back into the system to be recycled into a new type of robot. "The idea is that you analyse the current situation, then make a robot on the fly that can deal with it," says Sebastian Risi at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, a member of the team that came up with the system. If you need a robot that can fit through a small space or around an odd-shaped corner, you input those constraints into the software and it will deliver something suitable.