Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed self-moving robotic cubes with no exterior parts, according to a news release.

John Romanishin, a senior at MIT at the time, originally proposed the idea in 2011 to his robotics teacher Daniela Rus. She told him it could not be done, but two years later, she showed a video of a prototype based on Romanishin's design to a Cornell robotics researcher.

Hod Lipson told Rus the same thing she had told Romanishin: "That can't be done."

Now a research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligince Laboratory (CSAIL), Romanishin, Rus and MIT post-doctoral student Kyle Gilpin will present a paper in Nov. describing exactly how it can be done.

The group will present their paper on the cube-shaped robots at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

Called M-Blocks, the robots have no external moving parts, but are able to move side to side, jump up and down and climb over one another with an ultra-fast-spinning flywheel inside it. The flywheel can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute and provides the cube with angular movement. The M-Cubes also have particularly arranged permanent magnets on each of its edges to ensure that no two cubes will stick to one another.

"It's one of these things that the [modular-robotics] community has been trying to do for a long time," Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL, said. "We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it - despite being discouraged."

Gilpin said the team had to ditch a common principle of modular robotics, which keeps the system "statically stable." In other words, he said "you can pause the motion at any point, and they'll stay where they are." To make their model work, they had to forgo that principle.

"There's a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air," Gilpin says. "And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That's something that's totally unique to this system."

The team also envisioned a practical use of the M-Cubes. They could transport battery packs, lights, other small equipment and also be carry cameras, but it would not matter if one fell off of the group because it could rejoin on its own.

"It's one of those things that you kick yourself for not thinking of," Cornell's Lipson said. "It's a low-tech solution to a problem that people have been trying to solve with extraordinarily high-tech approaches."