Swarms of simple, interacting robots have the potential to unlock stealthy abilities for accomplishing complex tasks. Getting these robots to achieve a true hive-like mind of coordination, though, has proved to be a hurdle. In an effort to change this, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a surprisingly simple scheme: self-assembling robotic cubes that can climb over and around one another, leap through the air, and roll across the ground. Six years after the project's first iteration, the robots can now "communicate" with each other using a barcode-like system on each face of the block that allows the modules to identify each other. The autonomous fleet of 16 blocks can now accomplish simple tasks or behaviors, such as forming a line, following arrows, or tracking light.

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.